Emil Lederer: Review of E. R. Curtius, Der Syndikalismus der Geistesarbeiter in Frankreich (1922)

Emil Lederer’s review examines Curtius’s 1921 lecture on French intellectuals’ responses to postwar social change. Moving from national intellectual traditions through the ideology of the Producteur to the organization of intellectual workers, Lederer develops a sociological objection: a shared commitment to creative intelligence cannot override the divisions embedded in capitalist economic life. He welcomes Curtius’s rejection of cultural nostalgia but questions both his use of “syndicalism” and his assessment of these movements’ practical significance.

Lederer first reconstructs Curtius’s account of French intellectual continuity. French intellectuals understand themselves as custodians of an enduring tradition and locate the postwar crisis principally in politics and society:

Und das entspricht einem alten Grundzug französischer Entwicklung: in der geistigen Sphäre die Tradition zu halten, in der sozialen Realität aber revolutionär zu sein.

English translation: And that corresponds to an old fundamental trait of French development: to hold to tradition in the intellectual sphere, but to be revolutionary in social reality.

Lederer sharpens this contrast by observing that Germany makes its revolutions in philosophy while remaining attached to inherited social forms. Within France, however, intellectuals divide between Clarté and the larger, conservative Parti de l’Intelligence. Curtius concentrates on the latter’s unexpected conjunction of counterrevolutionary politics and transformative economic ideas.

The review traces this conjunction from Maurras’s fear that finance, capital, and privileged workers would subordinate intellectuals to the programme articulated in the Producteur. Here reactionary premises give way to demands for objective socioeconomic analysis and the stimulation of national production. Saint-Simon supplies the central figure: the inventive, intuitive entrepreneur understood as a producteur, or creator of works. Lederer connects this figure to Schumpeter’s entrepreneur, noting Curtius’s omission of that comparison. Artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs become analogous because their decisive contribution is invention; even apparently remote scientific and aesthetic activities acquire productive significance.

Lederer’s decisive turn comes when this expansive conception of creativity becomes a principle of social organization:

Aber der französische Syndikalismus ist zu sehr eine bestimmte Phase im Zuge der ökonomischen Entwicklung, als daß man ihn auf das von Curtius hervorgehobene Prinzip (neue Standesbildung auf ökonomischer, nicht auf politischer Basis) reduzieren dürfte.

English translation: But French syndicalism is too much a definite phase in the course of economic development for one to be permitted to reduce it to the principle emphasized by Curtius (the formation of a new estate on an economic, not a political, basis).

The Confédération des Travailleurs intellectuels, founded in 1920, proposes to unite intellectual workers under technical specialists’ leadership. Lederer distinguishes this scheme from guild socialism and industrial organization, which unite those employed within an industry. His objection is structural rather than merely organizational:

Diese Auffassung übersieht, daß in der V o l k s w i r t s c h a f t und ihrer Struktur bereits eine soziale Gliederung immer immanent mit gegeben ist, n e b e n welcher man zwar Baupläne anderer Art zeichnen, aber doch nur flüchtige, vorübergehende Gruppierungen ohne inneres Schwergewicht zu erzielen vermag.

English translation: This conception overlooks the fact that in the national economy and its structure a social articulation is always already immanently given, alongside which one may indeed draw up blueprints of another kind, yet is able to achieve only fleeting, transitory groupings without inner weight.

The proposed intellectual solidarity lacks an economic centre of gravity. Technicians would be asked to sacrifice their own capacity for action, while independent cultural producers already seek a separate elite association in the Compagnons de l’Intelligence. The movement’s neutrality toward the state further weakens its identification with syndicalism; its non-nationalism makes its connection with Action française chiefly historical.

Lederer consequently interprets these organizations as responses to economic restructuring, the postwar devaluation of intellectual labour, changing labour markets, and the expropriation of holders of monetary and rentier capital. Their language of rational technical organization does not itself settle substantive social questions. He nevertheless agrees with Curtius that culture cannot recover by retreating behind rationalization: emancipation must proceed through and beyond it. The review’s final tension is that professed anti-romanticism can itself become romantic when confidence in pure reason and the separate emancipation of intellectuals obscures the economic forces shaping their position. Its central contribution is to test intellectual self-understanding against the material conditions of collective action.