1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Lederer’s lecture interprets the Depression as a crisis of abundance without purchasing power, not as a mere shortage of goods, gold, or effort. Its opening paradox frames the whole argument: capitalist society can display full shop-windows and idle furnaces at the same time because production is governed by price, credit, and profit relations rather than social need.
Lederer’s 1931 lecture attacks the Depression orthodoxy that unemployment is proof of excessive wages and can be cured by wage cuts. His target is not merely one policy but a way of theorizing: simple equilibrium formulas, whether Ricardian or purchasing-power, miss the concrete totality of technology, monopoly, credit, crisis, and politics.
Lederer’s Planwirtschaft presents planning as a historically forced transition rather than an abstract doctrine. Written in the Depression, it begins from the claim that capitalism has already ceased to be a purely “free” economy: tariffs, cartels, subsidies, guarantees, emergency decrees, public works, and banking interventions have altered circulation and investment. The issue is therefore not whether planning should enter an untouched market order, but whether the planning already present will remain defensive, partial, and irrational, or become conscious social coordination.
Emil Lederer’s Der Massenstaat is a political-sociological diagnosis of fascism as the state form of massified modern society. Its central claim is that totalitarian dictatorship is not merely rule by a clique, a bureaucracy, or a traditional ruling class. It arises when society loses the mediating forms—classes, parties, associations, publics, and rational discussion—through which individuals become politically articulate. What remains is not democratic equality, but an amorphous population available for emotional mobilization.
Lederer’s handbook chapter treats social insurance as a historically new state form for capitalist wage society. Its subject is not charity or ordinary labour protection, but compulsory protection against illness, accident, invalidity, old age, survivors’ need, and—by appendix—unemployment. The opening history situates Bismarckian legislation among liberal, Christian-social, and state-socialist debates. Brentano’s proposals matter because they detach workers’ sickness protection from private life insurance and make collective worker insurance a public problem.