Lederer’s commentary on Dr. Heimann’s essay distinguishes economic explanation and institutional organization from metaphysical commitments and ethical transformation. Reserving judgment on Heimann’s fundamental position, he limits his intervention to its economic arguments:
Sie sollen lediglich zu dem Teil, welcher die ökonomische Theorie und die ökonomische Realität berührt, einige Anmerkungen machen.
English translation: They are intended merely to make a few remarks upon that part which touches economic theory and economic reality.
The three numbered sections examine value theory, cartels, and consumer cooperatives. Their connecting question is whether economic concepts or organizational changes can bear the philosophical and moral significance Heimann assigns to them.
The first section rejects an intrinsic connection between labor-value theory and materialism, or between marginal utility and an opposing metaphysics. Political affinities do not establish philosophical necessities: socialism’s attraction to labor-value theory does not make socialism necessarily materialist. Economic theories should instead be judged by their capacity to render economic processes intelligible.
Nicht das Wesenhafte und die tiefere Bedeutung der Wirtschaft, nicht ihre Substanz entschleiert uns der Wertbegriff, er ist der Blickpunkt, aus welchem heraus wir das Chaos ordnen können.
English translation: It is not the essential nature and the deeper significance of the economy, not its substance, that the concept of value unveils to us; it is the point of view from which we are able to bring order into the chaos.
Value is an organizing standpoint, not a revelation of economic life’s ultimate substance. Lederer’s objection to objective value theory concerns its explanatory scope, rather than the alleged philosophical priority of consumption. Commodity analysis cannot encompass the whole of economic reality; the restriction to reproducible goods in Ricardo and Marx, and the problem of ground rent, expose its limits. Nor does selecting a value theory determine one’s judgment of economic culture, any more than the laws of statics prescribe an architectural style.
Das beweist aber, wie sehr die allgemein theoretischen Gesichtspunkte nur letzte Ordnungsprinzipien sind, nichts über das Wesen der Wirtschaft (im Sinn von Bedeutung derselben) aussagen können.
English translation: But that proves how far the general theoretical points of view are merely ultimate principles of ordering and can say nothing about the essence of the economy (in the sense of its significance).
This methodological distinction underlies the institutional analysis. Lederer challenges the claim that cartels identify personal advantage with the advantage of others. Cooperation within a cartel remains conditional on its contribution to members’ profits. Less competition internally may mean stronger antagonism toward consumers. In Tönnies’s terms, association therefore remains Gesellschaft rather than becoming Gemeinschaft.
Cartels reorganize competition into larger units instead of abolishing it. Competition continues between stages of production and between industries offering alternative goods. Although cartelization can impede the equalization of profit rates and restrict individual entrepreneurial initiative, profitability remains its governing principle. Increased operational rationality may even reinforce the capitalist spirit. Concentration consequently provides no sufficient evidence of solidarity.
Consumer cooperatives receive parallel scrutiny. Their immediate foundation is economic self-help, and members commonly assess them through purchases, savings, and dividends. They may restore competitive prices, but monopoly power limits their effectiveness. Extending cooperative activity into production would encounter resistance from upstream suppliers, shifting social struggle into market relations rather than eliminating it. Lederer agrees that cooperation cannot automatically be identified with a new economic ethos, but questions the further claim that these institutions offer an especially accommodating form for ethical renewal.
The closing argument contrasts two accounts of transformation. In the Marxian account, economic development generates concentration and organized classes, preparing a decisive confrontation. Cartels and monopolies matter as moments in this conflictual process, not as reconciliations of competing interests. What appears to be an emerging solidaristic principle may instead sharpen class divisions.
Heimann’s alternative places the decisive change within the individual. Lederer asks why, on that premise, ethical renewal should depend on institutions becoming receptive in advance. A genuinely new disposition would itself have to transform resistant economic arrangements. Searching within capitalism for a ready-made institutional shelter risks compromising the moral demand with the practical accommodation it opposes. Tolstoy exemplifies the contrary position: conflict between existing reality and ethical conviction strengthens the obligation to overcome that reality. Cartel members, trust participants, and organized workers alike still require education into solidarity. Organizational change alone therefore cannot bridge Lederer’s central distinction: explanatory theory, institutional coordination, and moral transformation are separate achievements whose connection must be demonstrated.
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