Emil Lederer: Review of Hans Gehrig’s Die Begründung des Prinzips der Sozialreform (1915)

Emil Lederer’s 1915 review examines Gehrig’s literary-historical account of the foundations of social reform. Following the book’s four-part argument, he distinguishes classical political economy from its German successors and identifies a common methodological limitation beneath the conflict between free trade and reform. His qualified approval rests on the difference between reconstructing intellectual connections and systematically examining their conceptual foundations.

The first section challenges the identification of classical English economics with dominant-class interests. Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and especially Mill appear as sympathetic to workers rather than simply hostile to reform. Smith’s reluctance to support positive social-policy measures is explained through his opposition to the contemporary police state. The reformers’ immediate intellectual adversaries were therefore the classics’ successors, treated in Gehrig’s second section on German economic individualism.

Lederer traces this transformation through Bastiat to German economists such as Prince Smith. Free competition ceases to function merely as a theoretical premise and becomes an assertion about reality, thereby sanctioning existing arrangements. Among later German advocates, the intellectual connection with Smith and Ricardo largely disappears. The encounter with theory in this distorted form helps explain German scholarship’s hostility toward theoretical economics. Yet reformist opposition does not escape the underlying problem:

Aber die methodologische Grundlage der Sozialreformer ist mit der der Freihändler identisch.

English translation: But the methodological foundation of the social reformers is identical with that of the free traders.

This methodological equivalence does not imply identical political aims. It concerns the substitution of a preferred economic order for theoretical explanation:

Auch sie geben keine Theorie, sondern postulieren eine bestimmte Form der Wirtschaft und propagieren alle Maßnahmen, die zu ihrer Realisierung dienen können.

English translation: They too give no theory, but rather postulate a particular form of the economy and propagate all measures that can serve its realization.

The decisive distinction is thus between theoretical inquiry and programmatic advocacy, not simply between laissez-faire and intervention. Lederer accordingly invokes Menger’s insistence that reformers and the historical school confront the tasks of theoretical economics. Gehrig’s third section presents the struggle between the harmony doctrine and the reform principle as taking place on shared methodological ground.

The fourth section reconstructs reform’s differences from, and continuities with, earlier thought, especially the historical-ethical school and Comte. Its conclusion turns to the renewed controversy over value judgments in economics and the social sciences. The historical inquiry thereby leads back to the relationship between scientific explanation and practical commitments.

Lederer praises the investigation’s penetration and extensive use of sources, including minor writings, while finding that documentary completeness obscures the argument’s main lines. The book’s principal achievement is its reliable reconstruction of connections among social-policy currents in an area lacking exact historical studies. His closing invitation marks the limit of that achievement: Gehrig should complement the historical account with a systematic treatment of the principles whose justifications he has assembled.