Emil Lederer, Theoretische und statistische Grundlagen zur Beurteilung der modernen Angestelltenfrage (1912)

Emil Lederer’s habilitation thesis, represented here by pages 1–47 of the 1975 republication of Die Privatangestellten in der modernen Wirtschaftsentwicklung, establishes the theoretical and statistical foundations for studying salaried employees as a distinctive social formation. Its three chapters move from the growth of organized interest politics to employees’ class position and then to their demographic and occupational distribution. The central argument is that capitalist concentration produces more than fewer entrepreneurs and more workers: it creates expanding administrative, commercial, and technical strata whose dependence on employers does not entail a homogeneous proletarian identity.

The opening chapter historicizes the materialist conception of history without simply rejecting economic explanation. Economic interests differ in their intensity, their conscious articulation, and their organizational expression across classes. Institutions and inherited convictions also affect their force. Capitalist development increasingly brings society into conformity with a model that historical materialism presents as universally applicable: organized groups consciously struggle over the distribution of economic resources. Social Democracy accelerates this transformation by linking workers’ interests with a political worldview and compelling other parties to strengthen their own economic constituencies.

Lederer distinguishes parties’ claims to universal principles from interest organizations’ sustained representation of particular groups. Such organizations educate their members into collective interests while presenting those interests externally as conditions of the common good. Their growth changes the substance of parliamentary conflict:

Die Durchsetzung der Gesellschaft mit Interessenten-Organisationen und ihr wachsender Einfluß auf das politische Leben löst also den Kampf um Prinzipien ab durch ein Streben nach »Ausgleichung«.

English translation: The permeation of society by interest organizations and their growing influence on political life thus replaces the struggle over principles with a striving for “accommodation.”

Accommodation is not merely a milder form of ideological struggle. It raises constitutional problems because economically significant interests cannot necessarily accept numerical majority rule as an adequate measure of their importance. Territorial constituencies can leave dispersed minorities unrepresented; specialized courts and administrative bodies increasingly give state authority a particular class coloration. Interest organizations do not simply replace parties, however: parliamentary negotiation still requires groups to justify their demands beyond their own membership.

The second chapter makes employees a test of simplified class analysis. Industrial concentration generates technical and supervisory personnel within production itself, complicating the capitalist–proletarian opposition at its presumed foundation. Calling these employees either a “new middle class” or proletarians prejudges the inquiry. Their diversity stretches from poorly paid shop assistants to senior bank personnel, while commercial and technical employment have different histories. Commercial employees belong to the basic organization of trade; modern technical employees arise especially from the organizational requirements of large-scale industry.

Neither intellectual work nor a single technical function adequately defines the whole formation. Some commercial tasks require little intellectual activity, while technical employees may combine manual execution with specialized intellectual preparation. Their provisional unity is relational:

Diese Zwischenstellung, zwischen den Klassen, also etwas Negatives, ist das soziale Kriterium der Angestellenschaft und entscheidet sowohl im Bewußtsein der Angestellten selbst als in dem der Allgemeinheit mehr als die positive technische Funktion.

English translation: This intermediate position between the classes, thus something negative, is the social criterion of the salaried employee stratum and carries more weight, both in employees’ own consciousness and in that of the public, than their positive technical function.

This intermediate position is neither socially uniform nor necessarily permanent. Its lowest levels merge with workers and its highest with entrepreneurs. Employees’ eventual alignment depends on organizational development and their relations with established classes, not on technical progress alone.

The statistical chapter examines whether this formation possesses the numerical and structural conditions for collective influence. Using German occupational and establishment censuses, Lederer reconstructs categories that do not coincide with his social object: he removes public transport and communications officials from commercial totals and adds sales employees officially classified among workers. His corrected figures place private employees in industry and commerce at approximately 732,000 in 1895 and 1.52 million in 1907. He acknowledges incomplete corrections and differences between census series rather than treating official classifications as transparent social facts.

Industrial employment grows particularly rapidly. Rationalization, costing procedures, and increasingly elaborate factory organization expand clerical personnel alongside engineers and supervisors. Shared employment may consequently matter more than occupational resemblance:

Von entscheidender Bedeutung ist eben nicht so sehr die Art der Tätigkeit, der Beruf, sondern die Klassenlage und diese wird in erster Linie durch die Art der Unternehmung, durch das Verhalten zum Unternehmer bestimmt werden.

English translation: What is decisive is not so much the kind of activity, the occupation, but the class position, and this will be determined primarily by the kind of enterprise and by the relationship to the entrepreneur.

Lederer therefore emphasizes employees’ concentration in particular industries, large establishments, and cities rather than their national totals alone. Technical indispensability and proximity can strengthen solidarity and potential bargaining power. Sectoral differences qualify any simple equation between establishment size and employee intensity. His exclusion of women from one assessment of organizational strength also reveals a gendered assumption limiting the analysis.

The work’s lasting conceptual contribution is to distinguish economic dependence from social homogeneity. Concentration closes routes to self-employment while producing differentiated groups capable of independent organization. These chapters establish the basis for that possibility; they reserve fuller analysis of employees’ technical functions and their consequences for subsequent chapters.