Kagan's Princeton thesis centered on German socialist/Nazi who advocated war against capitalism and a "total ordering of life"

Elena Kagan's senior thesis at Princeton University, recounting the history of socialist politics in New York City, cited the theories of an influential German Marxist who notoriously switched allegiances to Nazism after Adolf Hitler attained power.

Werner Sombart was widely recognized as an academic proponent of Marxism and was once praised by Karl Marx's colleague Friedrich Engels as the only German professor who understood Marx's Das Kapital. During World War I, however, Sombart endorsed Germany's "heroic" war against the "capitalist spirit" represented by England. In 1934, Sombart published Deutscher Sozialismus, which advocated the "total ordering of life" as an expression of the German Volksgeist, or "national spirit."

In the introduction to her 1981 thesis, Kagan addresses a question famously asked by Sombart: Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? -- "Why is there no socialism in the United States?"