His prosecution by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security during the 1950s resulted in his relocation to England, where he became an English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge.

In 1932 Finley married Mary (née Moscowitz, who later changed to her mother's surname, Thiers), a schoolteacher, and the two enjoyed a happy and mutually reinforcing marriage.

"[2] Finley taught at Columbia University and City College of New York, where he was influenced by members of the Frankfurt School who were working in exile in America.

On 7 September 1952, Lewis Webster Jones, the president of Rutgers University, announced his intention to appoint Trustee and Faculty Committees to review the cases of professors involved in government inquiries.

In it, he applied the findings of ethnologists and anthropologists like Marcel Mauss to interpret Homer, a radical method that was thought by his publishers to require a reassuring introduction by an established classicist, Maurice Bowra.

Paul Cartledge asserted in 1995, "... in retrospect Finley's work can be seen as the seed of the present flowering of anthropologically-related studies of ancient Greek culture and society".

This text was later criticized by, amongst others, Kevin Greene,[8] who argues that Finley underplays the importance of technological innovation, and C. R. Whittaker,[9] who rejects the concept of a "consumer city".