Emil Lederer: Review of O. Stillich (1910)

Emil Lederer’s brief review of Die wissenschaftliche Erforschung großindustrieller Unternehmungen presents Stillich’s proposal to revive the scientific study of private enterprise. Its organizing move is to make the industrial firm the object of exact empirical inquiry:

Stilllich hält es für notwendig, die Privatwirtschaftslehre wieder zu beleben und weist auf die Aufgaben einer exakten Forschung hin, welche das industrielle Unternehmen zum Objekt der Untersuchung wählen würde.

English translation: Stillich holds it necessary to revive the doctrine of private business economy and points to the tasks of an exact research which would choose the industrial enterprise as the object of investigation.

Lederer proceeds from this methodological claim to the proposed research agenda: profitability, business cycles, technology’s influence on operations, cartels, mergers and combinations, competition, banking relationships, and workers’ conditions. The scope joins questions internal to the firm with its wider economic relationships; enterprise research would encompass more than profitability alone.

The closing sentence identifies the proposal’s intended intellectual and practical significance:

Eine solche Erforschung privatwirtschaftlicher Unternehmungen sei auch geeignet, die Dissonanz zwischen Theorie und Praxis aufzuheben.

English translation: Such an investigation of private business enterprises is also, he holds, suited to abolish the dissonance between theory and practice.

The review thus moves from a disciplinary revival through a concrete inventory of research problems to the promise of reconciling theory and practice. Lederer reports that promise without developing an independent critique or offering evidence of its realization.