The archive.

More employment need not mean economic recovery: this distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1937 analysis of National Socialist economic doctrine. He argues that rearmament required wages and consumption to remain constrained, since rising prosperity would make military expansion more expensive. His distinctive approach tests the regime’s appeals to national will against the continuing requirements of production, credit, and exchange. Private enterprise survives, but its decisions are subordinated to state purposes; autarchy promises independence while disregarding comparative costs. By separating economic mobilization from individual welfare, Lederer shows how spending and controls can redirect resources toward power without abolishing economic limits. The article offers a concrete way to examine what employment figures conceal when a government determines both the purposes of production and the sacrifices demanded of its population.

Scientific objectivity does not absolve scholars of responsibility for the questions they choose. In this 1937 address, Emil Lederer defends rigorous analysis while challenging the ideal of intellectual detachment: freedom’s moral worth may resist scientific proof, but inquiry cannot proceed without freedom to choose hypotheses. Speaking for the Graduate Faculty and honoring Thomas Mann, he links this methodological necessity to the defense of personal liberty against dictatorship. His account of authoritarian appeal turns on the burden of freedom—the desire to escape decisions and responsibilities by submitting to compulsory conformity. The address offers a precise distinction between fidelity to evidence and indifference to the conditions that make evidence-based inquiry possible.

But trust in mere analysis caused the intellectual to forget that every question he asks involves a decision.

Japan’s industrial expansion looks different when low wages and depressed farm incomes enter the explanation. Reviewing the July 1937 Japan issue of Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Emil Lederer values its economic evidence while questioning the political assumptions that shape its interpretation. His criticism becomes concrete in the conflict over rice prices: cheap rice helps sustain low industrial wages, but threatens farmers’ livelihoods; support for farmers puts pressure on workers’ real incomes. Rather than dismissing the collection as propaganda, Lederer distinguishes its empirical strengths from its neglect of competing social interests and peaceful alternatives to territorial expansion. This short review offers a pointed example of how a critic can use a publication’s own evidence to challenge the national necessities its contributors take for granted.

Does listening at home free people from the pressures of a political crowd—or bring propaganda directly to their firesides? In this review of César Saerchinger’s Hello America!—Radio Adventures in Europe, Emil Lederer tests the broadcaster’s claim that the microphone weakens demagogues by stripping away theatrical gestures and exposing insincerity. Father Coughlin and dictatorships’ multilingual short-wave broadcasts supply his counterexamples: manipulation can travel through a seemingly objective argument as readily as through a rant. Lederer values Saerchinger’s insider observations of broadcasting machinery and political figures, while asking what their reach means for public opinion. This brief review captures a precise tension between radio’s promise of independent listening and its capacity to make private homes part of an international political struggle.

Can an account of conflicting worldviews also explain why political restraint fails? In this brief 1939 review of Harley Farnsworth MacNair’s The Real Conflict between China and Japan, Emil Lederer welcomes an explanation that reaches beyond territory, wealth and power to the historical beliefs shaping state ambitions. His sharper intervention concerns the consequences of that explanation: he argues that a Japanese political system driven by prestige and unlimited ambition leaves advocates of a “sensible” policy powerless and makes appeasement futile. The review offers a compact encounter between appreciation and criticism, showing how Lederer turns MacNair’s account of ideological conflict into a question about whether a political system can accommodate moderation.

Modern dictatorship is not rule by a clique, a bureaucracy, or a defensive capitalist class; it arises, Lederer argues, when a society loses the classes, parties, associations, and publics through which individuals become politically articulate. What remains is an amorphous mass, available for emotional mobilization, crystallized around a leader and held together by propaganda that mimics argument while severing it from truth. Tracing d'Annunzio at Fiume, Italian Fascism, and the SA's conquest of the German street, he presents fascism as the destruction of society itself rather than its capture. His warning against the classless society defends not hierarchy but stratification, the plural conflict on which freedom depends. Written in American exile and read here in Angela Kornberger's German rendering of the 1940 English original, State of the Masses, it stands among the first emigre theories of totalitarianism.

Der totalitäre Staat ist der Staat der Massen.

English translation: “The totalitarian state is the state of the masses.”

Rising real wages do not by themselves establish that poverty has receded. In this review, published in English translation in 1931, Emil Lederer examines the first volume of The New Survey of London Life and Labour through that distinction. He values Charles Booth’s combination of statistical classification and intimate household observation, but asks what happens when its measures are carried across forty years of changing expectations. Deteriorating housing, commuting costs and lost leisure complicate the apparent gains in purchasing power; London’s locally rooted poor also challenge explanations centred on migration. Lederer’s favourable but questioning assessment shows what historical comparison demands of a social survey: evidence not merely of higher incomes, but of how economic change alters the conditions and possibilities of working-class life.

Salaried employees could strike, bargain collectively, and acknowledge a conflict with employers without abandoning their claims to middle-class distinction. This tension anchors Emil Lederer’s study of German private-sector employees after November 1918. Drawing on technical and commercial associations, salary agreements, and disputes over workplace representation, he distinguishes the adoption of union methods from conversion to socialism. Inflation eroded welfare funds, while comparisons with skilled workers’ earnings challenged assumptions of salaried superiority; yet occupational pride and nationalist allegiances persisted. Lederer treats revolution as an opening for collective action, not merely a consequence of economic decline. His account shows why increasingly similar employment interests could sustain sharply different political loyalties—and why organizational change cannot be read directly as a change in social identity.

A workshop can pass between generations; a salary lasts only as long as employment. Emil Lederer makes this difference in temporal horizon central to his account of modern economic dependence. In this essay, first published in 1918/19 and reprinted here in 1979, insecurity concerns not only how much people earn, but how far into the future they can organize their lives and sustain attachments. His comparison of proprietors, civil servants, salaried employees, and workers gives the psychology of modern life a specific economic foundation. Insurance sharpens the distinction: a pension can extend an income without restoring control over productive resources. The essay poses a demanding question for social reform: can greater security or collective ownership also give individuals a durable connection to the material foundations of their lives?

German trade unions emerged from the revolution of 1918 with more members, legal recognition, and greater influence—but no settled answer to what their new power should achieve. In this critical survey, Emil Lederer examines the tension between bargaining within capitalism and preparing to transform production. He tests institutional gains against their economic substance: inflation eroded wage increases and strike funds, while employer–union cooperation could secure recognition without altering private ownership. Works councils sharpened a further conflict, representing entire workforces rather than the members of voluntary unions. Lederer’s distinctive concern is how these organizational arrangements shaped competing ideas of socialism and class struggle. His analysis shows why stronger labor institutions could simultaneously stabilize existing economic relations and generate demands to overturn them.

War can impoverish an economy while enriching its owners. In this 1918/19 article, Emil Lederer examines that tension principally through Germany’s wartime experience, distinguishing depleted productive resources from growing monetary claims on future output. Agricultural receipts can rise as harvests shrink; industrial reserves can conceal equipment consumed without replacement; higher wages need not secure workers a lasting share in recovery. Reading prices, company accounts, and wage statistics against material shortages, Lederer asks who will command reconstruction—not merely how production will resume. His analysis also challenges the equation of extensive state regulation with an end to capitalism: rationing still leaves access dependent on money. The result is a concrete account of how wartime gains can become durable economic power even when the productive basis of wealth has deteriorated.

Abolishing the employer does not by itself give workers a stake in collective life. This distinction anchors Emil Lederer’s review essay on Walther Rathenau’s proposals for economic and social reconstruction. Welcoming Rathenau’s turn toward expropriation, Lederer asks what would make self-government more than a change of administrators: participation in production, municipal affairs, and communal housing must make solidarity an everyday experience. His criticism also reaches Rathenau’s fear that economic equality would impoverish culture. Why should the disappearance of wealthy patrons entail the disappearance of creative initiative or diverse audiences? Rather than promise socialist flourishing, Lederer challenges the projection of wartime deprivation onto a future social order. The essay offers a concrete account of what ownership reform leaves unresolved: motivation, cultural freedom, and the institutions through which people acquire shared responsibility.