Emil Lederer’s review essay examines Berthold Thorsch’s 1920 pamphlet of the same title as a contribution to the debate over socialization. Sympathetic to its emancipatory purpose, Lederer questions whether domination can be removed from economic life as an alien political element, or whether its abolition requires transforming economic structure itself. His opening characterization situates Thorsch outside established intellectual specializations:
Thorsch ist nicht »schulmäßiger« Sozialist, und er ist nicht professioneller Geschichtsphilosoph.
English translation: Thorsch is not a "school-trained" socialist, and he is not a professional philosopher of history.
Lederer reconstructs Thorsch’s contrast between political command and economic cooperation. Military and political authority emerge as protective arrangements but become self-serving, increasingly sustained by irrational impulses. Democratization does not necessarily overcome this pattern. The continuity between these forms of power is expressed categorically:
Militärische und politische Herrschaft sind von der gleichen Wesenheit.
English translation: Military and political domination are of the same essence.
Economic relations, by contrast, appear to permit differentiated exchanges, reciprocal accommodation, and overlapping associations. Where political antagonisms harden into struggles for supremacy, economic interests can supposedly be reconciled through adjustments in goods and services. Thorsch’s historical diagnosis therefore locates the principal obstacle to emancipation in political domination:
Die p o l i t i s c h e n H e r r s c h a f t s f o r m e n sind es, welche heute die Entfaltung einer freieren und schöneren Welt hemmen.
English translation: It is the political forms of domination which today impede the unfolding of a freer and more beautiful world.
This distinction governs his conception of socialization. State administration would perpetuate command rather than release the economy’s cooperative possibilities. Yet his alternative does not simply preserve capitalism: capitalist authority and oppressive economic advantages must also disappear. Thorsch interprets these as political intrusions into economic life. Their removal would enable economic society to develop according to its own character:
Derart kann die wirtschaftliche Welt zu sich selbst kommen, von dem falschen, ihrem inneren Wesen fremden politischen Einschlag befreit werden und eine neue Epoche des gesellschaftlichen Lebens kann beginnen.
English translation: In this way the economic world can come into its own, be freed from the false political admixture alien to its inner essence, and a new epoch of social life can begin.
Institutionally, this project favors autonomous enterprises, differentiated according to their circumstances and their workers’ capacities. Workers and employees would acquire effective control, rather than merely consultation or profit-sharing. Lederer detects syndicalist implications despite Thorsch’s rejection of that designation. He questions the simultaneous retention of entrepreneurs, capitalists, and risk premiums alongside increasingly dispersed ownership. An occupational representative body would guide the transition, but describing it as nonpolitical assumes precisely the freedom from power-seeking that needs explanation.
Lederer’s central objection concerns the separation of economic relations from domination. Competition can itself generate monopoly, whether through the survival of stronger firms or the coordination of producers. Economic power consequently cannot be explained away by classifying it as political. Eliminating such power would require changes within the economic order, not merely the removal of an external contamination. Ownership and political authority reinforce one another rather than belonging to independent spheres.
This structural criticism also exposes a difficulty of transition. Thorsch’s projected society presupposes an inward rejection of domination, yet neither rational instruction nor organizational reform explains how entrenched interests would relinquish control. Workers’ desire to govern enterprises might provide an effective motive, but its realization would involve struggles over power. Economic representative institutions would likewise remain implicated in political conflict while control of production carried political consequences.
Lederer’s discussion of productive cooperatives gives this criticism an institutional focus. Guild socialism, council movements, and cooperative building enterprises warrant renewed attention, but their possibilities vary across sectors. Forms suited to less capital-intensive activities cannot simply be generalized to mining and iron production. Small individual capital holdings and expectations of profit also provide an uncertain foundation for solidarity.
The essay ultimately connects structural transformation with moral motivation. Beneath the resentment criticized by Thorsch, Lederer recognizes an injured aspiration toward justice and solidaristic economic life. Insight into more refined cooperation is insufficient by itself to bring such a society into being. Lederer preserves Thorsch’s emancipatory ambition while challenging its reliance on a purified economic rationality: new institutions require changed dispositions and collective action, whose exercise cannot be cleanly separated from political power.
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