Emil Lederer, Zur Einführung (1921)

Emil Lederer’s signed introduction to Soziologische Probleme der Gegenwart, published in Die Weißen Blätter and dated Heidelberg, March 1921, outlines a program for confronting postwar social transformation. It connects a critique of German political romanticism with a diagnosis of intellectual disorientation and a commitment to socialist reconstruction. The supplied text includes page 5 from the 1969 reprint; this provenance does not establish a revised version.

BIS heute noch ist Deutschland das Land der politischen Romantik; es beginnt auch das der sozialen Romantik zu werden.

English translation: To this day Germany is still the land of political romanticism; it is beginning to become that of social romanticism as well.

Romanticism here names a failure to grasp reality, not merely a literary tendency. Lederer argues that German intellectuals transform supposedly immediate experience into concepts that cease to explain their objects. Appeals to a distinctively German political spirit thereby protect inherited power from criticism. His example is the wartime invocation of German freedom, which connected imperialist policy with claims about national essence. Intellectual abstraction becomes politically consequential when it supplies legitimating language for existing interests.

The postwar crisis makes this failure of perception especially damaging. The destruction of international relations and the disruption of Europe’s social structure demand constructive political imagination informed by economic possibilities and limits. Yet intellectuals interpret emergent social forces through comparisons with the comforts of the former order:

Er sieht ein Chaos, wo schon neue soziale Kräfte am Werke sind, und er vergleicht höchst indigniert diese vorläufigen Versuche, eine Weltkrise zu überwinden, mit den luxuriöseren Umständen früherer Tage.

English translation: He sees a chaos where new social forces are already at work, and, highly indignant, he compares these provisional attempts to overcome a world crisis with the more luxurious circumstances of earlier days.

The comparison mistakes an unfinished response to catastrophe for proof of incapacity. Nostalgia further obscures the distinction between those who enjoyed the old order’s advantages and those who created its wealth. Social romanticism thus rests on a distorted account both of past achievement and of present reconstruction.

Lederer’s central diagnostic reversal is to interpret much of the alleged crisis of socialism as a crisis of intellectual strata unable to find their place after the collapse. Socialism cannot plausibly bear responsibility for the breakdown of a society it had not governed. Nor does the enrichment of new privileged groups through war and revolution demonstrate socialist rule. Such accusations distract from the task of consciously shaping the transformation brought about by war and collapse.

The introduction presents the issue’s contributions as interventions in this task. Their differences coexist with an acceptance of the changed social situation and a shared determination to participate in its formation. Intellectual clarification, education, and moral commitment are analytically distinguishable but practically connected. Against private experience and sectarian withdrawal, Lederer invokes, schematically, the moral disposition of the eighteenth century.

The conclusion makes socialism the necessary medium of reconstruction rather than offering a detailed institutional blueprint. Personal hostility to it cannot justify abandoning the revolution to armed force. Lederer’s argument consequently joins an epistemic demand—to recognize actual social forces—with an ethical and political demand that intellectuals help shape the emerging order instead of retreating into nostalgia.