I first visited the United States in September 1980 when I spent two weeks at the New School for Social Research in New York. The main reason was the first personal meeting with Adolph Lowe (1893–1995), with whom I had been in close contact since spring 1977 when I got my PhD in economics from the University of Kiel. Lowe had built up a new department for research on business cycles and international statistical economics at the Kiel Institute of World Economics since April 1926, which soon acquired an international reputation (Hagemann 2021). The group included such outstanding economists as Gerhard Colm, Hans Neisser, Fritz (Frank) Burchardt, and for some years also Wassily Leontief and Jacob Marschak. None of them remained in Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Lowe had moved to the Goethe University in Frankfurt in October 1931, where he was dismissed after three semesters. Like many other émigré economists, he first went to Great Britain (Hagemann 2007), where he became an honorary lecturer in economics and political philosophy at the University of Manchester. In summer 1940 he moved further to New York where the Graduate Faculty of the New School had been founded as the “University in Exile” by Alvin Johnson, and Emil Lederer became the founding dean in 1933.1 Thus, in contrast to Colm, Lowe, as well as his lifelong friend Marschak (both were supervisors of Franco Modigliani’s New School PhD thesis) and Neisser were not members of the Mayflower generation.

The History of Economics Society (HES)—together with its Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET)—has played an important role in my activities as a historian of economic thought, from my early exciting days as a graduate student in 1994–95 to my term as HES president in 2016–17, and beyond. As I join the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the HES, I would like to offer some historiographic perspectives on its history as based mostly on my shared memories and personal trajectory. My first participation at a HES conference took place in 1994, when I presented a paper in the history of macroeconomics. Those meetings were presided, at Babson College (Boston), by Laurence Moss, who used the “Perlman system” of paper presentation by the discussants followed by reactions by the authors. I was lucky to have Bradley Bateman as my discussant. Brad kindly agreed with the argument of my paper about Frederick Barnard Hawley’s anticipation of John Maynard Keynes’s principle of effective demand, published two years later in the History of Political Economy (HOPE).

I began as the secretary/treasurer for the History of Economics Society (HES) in 1999. Prior to my appointment, I had attended one conference and really didn’t know much about the society. My colleague Jim Wible (who was an active member) asked me if I would be interested and essentially pushed my name forward (there probably were not any other takers at the time). I was handed a paper ledger, a notebook of minutes, another collection of materials that were passed down from president to president, and $50,000 in bank deposits.

The History of Economics Society (HES) is neither the oldest nor the largest academic society of historians of economic thought.1 However, no one would deny—certainly not when celebrating its fiftieth anniversary—the vital role the HES has had in establishing and shaping the field of history of economics. The goal of this paper is to go beyond mere favorable impressions to an evidence-based history grounded in analyzing the attendees of the exploratory conference in 1973 and the fifty annual HES meetings that followed.

Attending the annual HES conferences is a fantastic learning experience. In this personal testimony I try to explain the reasons for this enthusiasm, around three fundamental aspects: the innovations and changes in the historiographical field of the history of economics, the informal governance of a dynamic community, and the relevance of methodological pluralism as a guide for research development.