Lederer’s essay is a compressed sociology of revolution written at the edge of the German collapse of 1918 and then framed, in the November preface, by the events it had almost anticipated. The preface reads the German Revolution as beginning not in a fully formed socialist seizure of power but in military refusal: the army and navy resist the continuation of a lost war, and only then does the movement become proletarian because, in an industrial state, mass action necessarily becomes workers’ action.
es war in Entstehung und Verlauf eine Aktion militärischer Massen.
English translation: in its origin and course it was an action of military masses.
The central thesis is that revolution is neither mere disorder nor the mechanical result of grievances. It occurs when an old power apparatus still exists but has become spiritually hollow, and when a new idea gathers enough social force to pass into action. Lederer’s defining formula is deliberately idealist yet sociological:
Was ist Revolution in diesem Sinn? Sie ist der Durchbruch einer Idee zur Wirklichkeit.
English translation: What is revolution in this sense? It is the breakthrough of an idea into reality.
The essay’s structure follows from this claim. First Lederer defines the paradox of revolution: dead authority persists as apparatus, while the new idea must realize itself through means alien to its own purity. Then he asks what makes an idea revolutionary, how intellectual strata shape it, how organized classes carry it, and how war distorts the whole process. Against explanations from corruption or administrative failure, he insists that revolution is a struggle over social principles.
nie kann man aus „Mißständen“ und „Fehlern“ eine Revolution erklären.
English translation: one can never explain a revolution out of "grievances" and "errors."
The core conceptual move is the pairing of idea and social force. A revolution must have universality enough to seize imaginations, but also a class or mass capable of overthrowing the existing order. Lederer formulates this as a double condition:
Zweierlei ist jeder echten Revolution wesentlich: daß sie Idee ist und daß sie eine soziale Kraft mobilisieren kann.
English translation: Two things are essential to every genuine revolution: that it is an idea, and that it can mobilize a social force.
This leads to his sociology of intellectuals. Ideas become revolutionary first in intellectual strata, whose national temperament, historical culture, and relation to ruling classes determine whether they can translate social tensions into a compelling future image. Russia, for Lederer, shows the power of a socialist intelligentsia able to make Marxism into lived faith; Germany, by contrast, has organization without an equally strong revolutionary intellectual culture. Hence his anxiety that bureaucratic party and union structures may lack a living idea, while radical energies may become blind.
The most difficult passage in the argument concerns violence. Revolution cannot remain contemplation, because the state monopolizes organized force; yet once the idea calls upon force, it risks betrayal by the independent logic of violence, terror, and dictatorship. Lederer therefore refuses both pacifist abstraction and simplified power politics:
Die Anwendung der Gewalt ist es also, welche Idee und Masse zusammenführt.
English translation: It is the application of force, then, that brings idea and mass together.
Modern revolution, in his account, is inseparable from class organization. Unlike earlier revolutions, where amorphous “people” could appear as the agent, capitalist society has already grouped the population into organized classes, workplaces, unions, and economic units. This makes revolution more disciplined and rapid, but also more protracted, because counterrevolutionary forces are organized too.
Da ist die Revolution von Anfang an bereits ein sozialer Kampf, weil die ganze Gesellschaft sich bewußt nach diesen Gesichtspunkten gruppiert hat.
English translation: There the revolution is from the outset already a social struggle, because the whole of society has consciously grouped itself according to these points of view.
The final section on war gives the essay its historical urgency. War does not simply cause revolution; it rearranges its conditions. It foregrounds peace aims, militarizes society, weakens class clarity, exhausts productive forces, and may create mass desperation before a constructive revolutionary idea has matured.
In Kriegszeiten ist die Entwicklung der Idee in sich widerspruchsvoller, sie begegnet allerlei Hemmungen, aber die Spannungen wachsen und können zu Massenaktionen ohne ideelle Vorformung werden.
English translation: In wartime the development of the idea is more contradictory in itself; it encounters all sorts of impediments, but tensions grow and may turn into mass actions without prior ideological shaping.
Lederer’s relevance lies in this refusal to separate ideas from organization, masses from intellectuals, or revolution from the social form of modern capitalism. The essay is both diagnosis of 1918 and a typology of revolutionary crisis: old authority dies inwardly before it falls outwardly; ideas need carriers; violence is necessary and dangerous; class organization both saves revolution from anarchy and deepens its conflicts. Its closing distinction from war gives the work its final theoretical emphasis:
So ist die Revolution — und das ist vielleicht der wesentlichste Unterschied zum Phänomen des Krieges — ein emotional geistiger Prozeß und für jedes Volk ein Wendepunkt auf seinem Wege in der Geschichte.
English translation: Thus the revolution — and this is perhaps the most essential difference from the phenomenon of war — is an emotional and spiritual process, and for every people a turning point on its path through history.
This work was divided into 7 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 7 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian