During the time of its existence, the center attracted rising academic stars such as Alfred D. Chandler Jr., who would later become one of the seminal figures in the field of business history.
[5] Despite the schisms, members of the Research Center were all disciples of Joseph Schumpeter (d. 1950) and Werner Sombart (d. 1941~writings frequently cited by Redlich), the principal architects of schöpferische Zerstörung revolutions in political economy.
[6] Eric Reinert further traced the transmission of ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality, additional Nietzschean writings, works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich List ideas, and notations by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz into economic studies by both Werner Sombart and Joseph Schumpeter.
[10] In a similar vein, Redlich began to publish articles, along with Arthur Cole, on the idea of an "individualist, daimonic political economy" that pushed advocates of both laissez-faire and communism into accepting "businesspeople, and generally business history, as the fountainhead of economic theory."
For example, Redlich observed that " 'Adam Smith and the classical economists presupposed that the business man in following his own interests would develop his own enterprises and, automatically, the economic life of his nation.'
" Cole "sought to grasp the whole of economic life, of global commercial society properly understood as the dynamic interaction of resources, entrepreneurs, firms, and states in an international system."
He also periodically returned to his notion of reizbarkeit, which he glossed in English as " 'Impressionism' [instead of 'a choleric nationalism']," in order to explain the conceptual underpinnings of " 'my work.'
" In 1964, he elaborated on reizbarkeit as “ 'half or entire nights spent alone in harmony with the nature of the [German] homeland [that] cannot be separated from my intellectual development' ” as well as a life commitment " 'to defend the inherited cultural patrimony and the ravines of the Reich.'
Bailyn described his early 1950s colleagues at the Research Center as an "excellent group, led by Arthur Cole of the Harvard Business School.