Emil Lederer, Vorwort

Emil Lederer’s editorial preface, originally published in 1930, sets out the research programme for a series of investigations into cartels initiated through the Verein für Sozialpolitik. Its purpose is to organize an inquiry, not announce settled findings. The central methodological claim is that cartel theory requires industry-specific evidence: general questions about prices, protection, monopoly, and rationalization cannot be answered without examining how particular industries operate.

The project began with cartel price formation but expanded to include a critical assessment of a substantial yet uneven literature. Lederer identifies the contributions and their sequence: Professor Dr. Notz of Washington supplies the survey of American cartel literature in the first part; Privatdozent Dr. A. Wolfers’s treatment of German literature is reserved for the next part. Further contributions are to address cartel pricing, taxation, and legal regulation. The preface thus connects a review of existing knowledge with theoretical analysis and planned industrial case studies.

The committee’s programme treats cartel formation as something to explain rather than take for granted. It asks whether cartels would have developed under free trade, how tariffs and freight protection support organization in basic industries, and what consequences follow for manufacturing industries further downstream. Technical progress enters the same inquiry into the conditions of cartelization. Other questions concern differences between competitive and cartel pricing, interactions among cartels at successive production stages, the effects of stable prices on the business cycle, movement toward trust organization, and whether dumping necessarily follows from cartelization. These are research questions, not conclusions about inevitable developments.

Lederer makes the case-study method explicit:

Denn nur im Rahmen monographischer Darstellungen können die Sonderprobleme der Kartellpolitik eine entsprechende Behandlung finden.

English translation: For only within the framework of monographic studies can the specific problems of cartel policy receive adequate treatment.

The detailed agenda explains why this methodological restriction matters. Researchers must investigate how prices are calculated and why cartels sometimes refrain from charging the highest prices available to them. They must also consider outside competitors, substitute products, export policy, and buyers’ resistance through purchasing cooperatives or purchasing cartels. Pricing power therefore cannot be understood solely from the cartel agreement: it depends on relations with competitors, customers, and adjacent markets.

The inquiry also extends inside the organization of production. Vertical concentration may alter the position of cartel-bound enterprises, while by-products excluded from agreements can have repercussions for cartel pricing. Rationalization and production programmes require attention alongside prices. Particularly revealing is the question of why cartels do not become trusts: organizational development is presented as a problem requiring explanation, rather than an automatic progression toward a more unified monopoly.

International cartels introduce a further comparative dimension. National tariffs may help bring them into existence, yet international agreements may in turn change how tariffs function. Lederer also proposes examining international pricing and rationalization, while cautioning that their effects may be less detailed than within a single economic territory. The programme consequently links domestic institutions to international organization without assuming identical mechanisms at both levels.

Its empirical ambitions encounter a fundamental problem of access and independence:

Auch ist zur Behandlung dieser Fragen neben der intimen Kenntnis der Industrie doch auch eine gewisse Distanzierung von deren Interessenkreis erforderlich.

English translation: Addressing these questions also requires, alongside intimate knowledge of the industry, a certain distance from its sphere of interests.

Industrial knowledge is indispensable, but identification with industrial interests would compromise the inquiry. Lederer explains that internal information about production conditions and business policy is not readily made public, making suitable contributors difficult to recruit. His hopes for monographs on important industries in the next part remain explicitly provisional.

The preface closes by defining practical limits:

Zum Schluß sei noch bemerkt, daß sich die Untersuchungen in einem engeren Rahmen halten mußten, um nicht den Umfang allzusehr anschwellen zu lassen, und um außerdem nicht mit den entsprechenden Untersuchungen der Wirtschaftsenquete zu kollidieren.

English translation: Finally, it should be noted that the investigations had to remain within a narrower framework so as not to let their extent grow excessively and also to avoid conflicting with the corresponding investigations of the economic inquiry.

The work’s significance lies in this disciplined research design: it joins theoretical questions to comparative industrial evidence while acknowledging restricted access, interested testimony, and institutional overlap. Its contribution is a programme for explaining cartel behaviour without reducing diverse industries to a single model.