Emil Lederer, Technology

Emil Lederer’s encyclopedia entry Technology, originally published in 1934 and republished in the supplied 1937 version, examines modern machinery as a condition of capitalist development without treating it as an independent cause of history. Moving from industrial production through class relations and technological unemployment to warfare and culture, it distinguishes technical capacities from the economic institutions and political powers that determine their use. Its central tension is between unprecedented productive possibilities and the social arrangements that prevent their secure realization.

Although a technological conception of history is to be rejected, it must nevertheless be admitted that modern technology was one of the most important conditions which made possible the rise of the industrial system.

Lederer locates capitalism’s distinctive dynamism neither in division of labor nor in standardized mass production, both of which existed earlier, but in machinery powered by natural forces. Mechanization enabled output to outpace population growth, supporting industrial expansion and higher living standards. Yet this achievement also depended on monetary, social, and psychological conditions. Technology is indispensable to the explanation of capitalist wealth, but insufficient by itself.

The scientific organization of production shifts planning into preparatory stages, leaving many workers to execute engineers’ designs mechanically. Industry simultaneously provides instruments that accelerate scientific research. Lederer qualifies Weber’s and Sombart’s association of capitalism with calculation: earlier cultures also possessed rigorously regulated practices, while rationalist tendencies preceded modern machinery. What changes is calculation’s refinement and reach. Nor does rational production necessarily produce rational social experience.

The most modern and most rational technological development thus is accompanied by the appearance of irrational mass movements.

The contrast arises because systematically organized workplaces remain exposed to apparently incomprehensible market disturbances. Crises paralyze production and restore an atmosphere of mystery to a supposedly disenchanted world; monotonous work may reinforce this disposition. Lederer thus connects irrational mobilization not simply to technological backwardness but to the experience of advanced industrial society.

Mechanization reorganizes classes as well as tasks. It concentrates workers, diminishes some forms of skill, and expands technical, commercial, and administrative employment. The resulting bureaucratization does not give engineers corresponding authority: entrepreneurs control finance and markets, while most technicians remain replaceable functionaries. Distribution becomes especially difficult because wages are simultaneously employers’ costs and consumers’ purchasing power. Machinery’s fixed costs magnify the consequences of misjudging that relationship. Although living standards rose substantially, improvements remained unequal, and older workers faced displacement or declining earnings.

Technology also strengthens imperial power through transport, communications, weapons, and capital exports. Domination encouraged a belief that technical success demonstrated Western cultural superiority. Nevertheless, Lederer rejects a single trajectory of social transformation. Small producers can appropriate technical improvements; growing salaried and intellectual groups complicate a simple polarization between capitalists and workers. Electrification strengthens small producers in western Europe but supports collectivization in Soviet Russia.

This ambivalence of influences, depending on the distribution of political power, is one of the most powerful arguments against a technological interpretation of history.

The entry’s most sustained economic analysis concerns unemployment. War, inflation, and organized scientific research accelerate innovation, while increasingly widespread mechanization extends into finishing processes. Lederer distinguishes inventions that create new needs and industries from improvements chiefly designed to save labor. Nineteenth-century expansion cannot establish that subsequent displacement will always be absorbed.

As for compensation, it does not come about automatically.

Reemployment requires capital, entrepreneurial initiative, workers’ reorientation, and investment opportunities. Adjustment must also overcome depreciated assets, lost purchasing power, and debts contracted under earlier prices. Cost reductions can expand demand under favorable conditions, but this possibility is not a guarantee. Lederer therefore opposes both automatic-equilibrium reasoning and explanations that attribute the whole crisis to machinery while neglecting war, trade barriers, and disrupted international capital flows. Additional purchasing power alone cannot resolve every obstacle to a new equilibrium.

His criticism of technocracy follows the same distinction between physical capability and economic organization. An energy-based monetary standard cannot adequately value labor and capital, and technical expertise does not eliminate allocation problems.

Even a fully planned economy, however, must calculate in terms of economic units, for its main problem also is the proper application of the available production elements; and the evaluation of these is derived not from their horse power but from their relative scarcity.

The concluding sections extend this argument to politics and culture. Wartime mobilization concentrates state power; propaganda and instruments of violence furnish means for totalitarian domination. Yet industrial dynamism also requires intellectual freedom. Lederer rejects romantic comparisons that make older agricultural, artisanal, or coerced labor inherently more fulfilling than factory work. Modern monotony can be especially damaging, but industry also creates skilled occupations and enables broader cultural participation.

The final appeal to Marx identifies a contradiction between productive capacities and relations of exploitation, rather than an intrinsic cultural defect in machines. Mass education and emancipation create possibilities for both cultural development and demagogy. Technology supplies instruments for these opposing outcomes; its significance depends on social organization. The entry remains relevant as an account of why productivity gains do not automatically yield employment, equitable prosperity, or political freedom—and why their failure to do so cannot be explained by technology alone.