Allen Sievers Biography

Professor Allen M. Sievers was born in 1918. He attended the University of Chicago and graduated at twenty years of age. He received a Masters of Arts degree in 1941 and a PH.D. in 1948 at Columbia University and served in the United States Army Air Forces Bureau of Foreign Affairs from 1942 to 1945.

His first faculty appointment was at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Thereafter he served on the faculty of Tufts University, University of Massachusetts and the University of Florida before being appointed Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Utah in 1968. He retired from the University of Utah at the end of the 1997-98 school year but continued to teach every term until his death in May of 2003.

Professor Sievers was an extraordinary intellectual. He had a boundless intellectual curiosity and, over the years became knowledgeable in nearly intellectual discipline from mathematics and physics to history and philosophy.

This breath of knowledge can be seen in his many scholarly publications. His books included General Economics (J.B. Lippincott), The Mystical World of Indonesia (John Hopkins University Press), Revolution, Evolution and the Economic Order (Prentice Hall), and Has Market Capitalism Collapsed? (Columbia University Press). He also wrote numerous monographs and journal articles.

Professor Sievers was an invaluable colleague and an extraordinary teacher because of his broad, multidisciplinary knowledge and his eagerness to share it with colleagues and students. He was, in the opinion of most of us who knew him well, one of the last (and most interesting) of universal scholars in the American Academic World.