The archive.

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.

German trade unions recovered members, won wage increases and gained official recognition during 1916–18—but how much power did these gains confer? In this instalment of his Sozialpolitische Chronik, Emil Lederer distinguishes organizational strength from workers’ capacity to secure adequate consumption, freedom of movement and political influence. Labour scarcity strengthened bargaining while military controls restricted mobility; higher money wages could not compensate for missing civilian goods. His statistical scrutiny accompanies a critical examination of union leaders’ cooperation with government and their increasingly contested authority among workers. Completed in autumn 1918 and published unchanged in 1920, the chronicle preserves an analysis made before demobilization transformed its conditions. It offers a concrete account of how institutional recognition and economic concessions could coexist with political subordination.

A state can define a monetary unit, but can it explain what that unit will buy? In this review of Kurt Singer’s Das Geld als Zeichen, Emil Lederer presses the gap between money’s legal validity and its purchasing power. He credits Singer’s insights into credit creation and economic fluctuations while questioning whether central-bank management can secure stability without a fuller account of the economy. The same demand for concrete explanation shapes his criticism of Singer’s cultural history: medieval debasement and postwar currency collapse require analysis of fiscal pressures and exchange relationships, not merely the invocation of an epoch’s spirit. The review offers a pointed distinction between recognizing that money is historically conditioned and explaining how particular economic conditions sustain—or undermine—it.