Emil Lederer: Planning and Recovery (1939)

Lederer’s published round-table contribution to Divergencies in the Development of Recovery in Various Countries distinguishes four types of planning: war economics, Russian planning, totalitarian planning, and planning within a “normal” capitalist state. The brief intervention makes planning intelligible through its purposes and economic setting, rather than treating all state direction as one system.

War economics would be, in every state, a system of complete control, because war financing will always entail the creation of additional purchasing power, which—without price control and rationing—would soon drive the economical system on the path of a runaway inflation.

Here comprehensive control follows from the inflationary pressures of war finance. Lederer then characterizes Russian planning as a planned Industrial Revolution: its influence abroad was political, without generating special measures in already industrialized countries. Totalitarian planning, by contrast, anticipates war economics and may lower living standards, with the United States excepted from that prediction.

The final category shifts from mobilization and industrialization to recovery within capitalism:

Planning as business cycle policy is the consequence of obstacles which are in the way of horizontal expansion and the various measures of a planning policy (monetary policy, price control, regional planning, public works) are as many means to enforce horizontal expansion.

Monetary policy, price control, regional planning, and public works thus share an expansionary function despite their different instruments. Lederer’s central conceptual move is to distinguish planning directed toward war or industrial transformation from planning intended to overcome barriers to capitalist expansion. The contribution supplies a compact framework for comparing recovery policies, although it neither defines “horizontal expansion” nor develops country-by-country evidence.