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Eduard Magnus Mortier Heimann (11 July 1889 – 31 May 1967) was a German economist and social scientist who advocated ethical socialist programs in Germany in the 1920s and later in the United States. He was hostile to capitalism but thought it was possible to combine the advantages of a market economy with those of socialism through competing economic units governed by strong state controls.
Although Heimann was attracted to the German Youth Movement, he supported the SPD in the November Revolution of 1918. Early in 1919, the provisional government in Berlin made him general secretary of the Socialization Commission. In Easter 1923 Heimann spoke to a group of young socialists demonstrating against the French occupation of the Ruhr. He stressed the spiritual aspects of socialism in his speech. Heimann was a professor of theoretical and practical social economics at the University of Hamburg from 1925 to 1933.
In the 1920s, Heimann tried to convince the Social Democrats to follow an ethical socialist program of greatly expanded social programs and improvements to working conditions. From 1930 he was co-editor of the Neue Blätter fūr den Socialismus with Fritz Klatt and Paul Tillich. He deliberately used terms similar to those of the National Socialists in an effort to gain the support of the Mittelstand, but by confusing ethical socialism with Nazism he probably inadvertently advanced the cause of the Nazis. Heimann's books were among those banned and burned by the Nazis in 1933.
In 1933, Heimann emigrated with his family to the United States. He taught at The New School in New York City. The Fellowship of Socialist Christians was organized in the early 1930s by Reinhold Niebuhr and others with similar views. Later it changed its name to Frontier Fellowship and then to Christian Action. The main supporters of the Fellowship in the early days included Heimann, Paul Tillich, Sherwood Eddy and Rose Terlin. In its early days, the group thought capitalist individualism was incompatible with Christian ethics. Although not Communist, the group acknowledged Karl Marx's social philosophy.
Heimann returned to Hamburg in 1961. He died there in 1967. His descendants live in California (US) and in Israel.
Heimann thought that the true goal of Karl Marx had been to restore the dignity of labor as opposed to abolishing private property. He did not believe that reducing hours of work was a useful goal, since the majority of people would fail to use leisure for creative activity. He thought that meaningful work was more rewarding for most people than passive leisure occupations. Heimann thought socialists should push for reforms to social policy and working conditions, and this would help replace the capitalist system with the new socialist order. In 1929 he explained the logic of the social-policy movement,
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