Emil Lederer: Review of A. G. Raunig, Gleichgewicht zwischen Landwirtschaft und Industrie (1910)

Lederer’s short review reads Raunig’s proposed reconciliation of agriculture and industry as an expression of Austrian heavy industry’s protectionist interests. Beginning with the institutional position of the Industrielle Klub, he argues that tariffs and cartels raise domestic prices above already high world-market levels. Rising living costs burden broad social strata while increasing heavy industry’s profits and strengthening its alliance with agriculture, especially where wages fail to keep pace.

Diese Interessenharmonie — in der Ausnutzung des inländischen Marktes — zeigt die Schrift Raunigs.

English translation: This harmony of interests — in the exploitation of the domestic market — is what Raunig's tract displays.

The decisive move is to recast sectoral “equilibrium” as a shared exploitation of the domestic market. Lederer distinguishes heavy industry from manufacturers of finished goods: agricultural price increases create production-cost problems for the latter, but Raunig passes over this conflict. His proposed compromise rests instead on a common interest in preserving bourgeois society. What appears as reconciliation thus excludes those who bear its costs.

Lederer places the pamphlet alongside contemporary German heavy-industrial thinking, while identifying Austria’s limited export ambitions as a condition that makes domestic compromise easier.

Hinzu kommt nur noch die österreichische Genügsamkeit mit dem »inneren Markt«, die Resignation, auf dem Weltmarkt (außer auf dem Balkan etwa) etwas bedeuten zu wollen.

English translation: To this there is added only the Austrian contentment with the "internal market," the resignation of any wish to signify something on the world market (except in the Balkans, say).

This concentration on the protected home market does not establish agreement across Austrian industry. Lederer questions whether the many industrial and craft producers suffering from high prices would share Raunig’s conciliatory outlook, including on taxation. The pamphlet’s silence about these interests reinforces his criticism of its selective representation.

The review closes by crediting Raunig with extensive numerical material drawn from good sources, providing a concise picture of Austria’s commercial-policy situation. Its significance lies in separating this documentary value from the political claim of harmony: Lederer exposes how an alliance between agriculture and heavy industry can present its own interests as those of industry and society generally.