Franz Oppenheimer was professor of economics and sociology at the University of Frankfurt in Germany until he retired in 1929. In 1933 he was forced to flee the Nazi regime and eventually came to the United States, where he died in 1943.

Paul Gottfried is professor of political science at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Search for Historical Meaning; Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory; Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria; and After Liberalism (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). He is general editor of Religion and Public Life.