Lederer’s short review criticizes the conceptual boundaries and descriptive method of Müffelmann’s survey. The book covers employers’ associations in industry, trades, commerce, and agriculture, including official representative bodies, while largely excluding workers’, salaried employees’, and civil servants’ organizations. For Lederer, this scope is simultaneously too broad and too narrow:
So wird also in der Darstellung einerseits zuviel, andererseits zu wenig geboten.
English translation: Thus the presentation offers on the one hand too much and on the other too little.
The objection concerns relationships, not simply missing material. Lederer distinguishes specialized economic organizations and official interest representation from class-oriented associations. Employers’ associations cannot be understood independently of unions and employees’ organizations: their activities condition one another. By separating them, Müffelmann obscures the organization of society along class lines and its significance for both state and autonomous social policy.
The review moves from this problem of classification to an assessment of the book’s method. Lederer acknowledges its broadly objective historical outline, but argues that neutrality becomes an avoidance of inquiry:
Die Objektivität geht allerdings so weit, daß sich der Verf. auch jeder Kritik, resp. Untersuchung der Programme und der Tätigkeit der Verbände enthält.
English translation: The objectivity, however, goes so far that the author refrains from any criticism, or rather investigation, of the programmes and the activity of the associations.
The resulting survey supplies material without explaining what these associations mean for the German economy and polity. The review’s central demand is therefore for a relational analysis of organized interests: institutional histories require examination of programs, practices, and reciprocal class relations if they are to reveal associations’ social and political importance.
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