Emil Lederer: Review of Georg Hanisch’s Probleme der Volkswirtschaft (1911)

Emil Lederer’s short review assesses Hanisch’s attempt to explain elementary economic facts through major theories. Its central judgment is that this instructional aim gives way to an inadequately argued polemic against Marx. Lederer first examines the book’s theoretical criticisms, then briefly describes its historical survey and proposed “liberal socialism.”

Er bekämpft grundsätzlich die Arbeitswerttheorie, die er als »willkürliche Konstruktion« bezeichnet, ohne jedoch für seine Ablehnung ein ernsthaftes Argument beibringen zu können.

English translation: He combats the labour theory of value on principle, describing it as an "arbitrary construction", without, however, being able to adduce a serious argument for his rejection.

The objection concerns the quality of Hanisch’s reasoning, not simply his rejection of the labour theory of value. Lederer finds insufficient knowledge of Marx and the Marx literature, quotations substituted for argument, and assertions opposed to assertions, particularly concerning wage determination. Hanisch also fails to identify the theory he would put in place of labour value and ignores marginal utility theory.

Lederer nevertheless distinguishes inadequate criticism from a potentially substantive theoretical question. Hanisch asks whether labour-power enters prices at its production costs and whether surplus value thereby disappears. For Lederer, this poses no problem within Marx’s system, but becomes a genuine issue once competition, excluded by Marx, is brought into the analysis. Hanisch’s failure is to formulate and investigate that issue precisely.

The review’s sharpest methodological distinction appears in its discussion of crises. Hanisch locates their cause in the difficulty of withdrawing invested capital and trained labour from overcrowded branches of production, rather than in unplanned commodity production, general overproduction, or underconsumption.

Hier setzt H. eine Zwischenursache, ein Glied in der Entwicklung von der letzten Ursache zum Ausbruch der Krise der Ursache gleich und glaubt damit etwas zu einer Erhellung der Zusammenhänge beigetragen zu haben.

English translation: Here H. equates an intermediate cause, a link in the development from the ultimate cause to the outbreak of the crisis, with the cause itself, and believes that he has thereby contributed something to an elucidation of the connections.

Lederer treats this rigidity as an intermediate mechanism whose causal significance still requires explanation. Identifying a familiar obstacle to adjustment does not establish why it arises or how it produces a crisis. The review thus makes a compact demand for causal analysis rather than a relabelling of observed economic difficulties.

The closing paragraph turns from criticism to a largely descriptive account of Hanisch’s second part. Following a brief economic history, Hanisch develops a state-economic system drawing extensively on Schäffle. Each person would be an individual worker and, through membership in the state, a joint owner of state capital.

Die Staatswirtschaft werde also die Aufhebung des Klassengegensatzes verwirklichen.

English translation: The state economy, then, will realise the abolition of the class antagonism.

This is the reported promise of Hanisch’s proposal, not an independently established conclusion by Lederer. The review ends without testing it in detail. Its principal significance lies in the standards it applies to economic controversy: a criticism must reconstruct its target accurately, specify its own theoretical commitments, and distinguish causal mechanisms from ultimate causes.