2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Weimar's debate over Rationalisierung becomes, in this 1931 study, a theory of capitalist dynamics. Against the compensation doctrine that markets quietly reabsorb workers displaced by machinery, Lederer argues that labor-saving innovation can leave durable structural unemployment whenever its tempo outruns capital formation and the growth of jobs. His engine is the organic composition of production: modern progress means more capital and fewer workers per unit of output. A model of dynamic equilibrium disturbed by innovation in coal mining shows the mechanism — the rationalized mines draw capital from static sectors, produce the same coal with roughly half the labor, and shrink the economy's capacity to place workers, so the wage bill falls further than the social product. Neither anti-machine reaction nor laissez-faire optimism will do; what he urges is social control over the pace and direction of technical change.
Bei einem sehr schnellen Tempo des technischen Fortschritts können dann die Freisetzungswirkungen zu einer strukturellen, d. h. die Depressionsperiode überdauernden Arbeitslosigkeit führen.
English translation: “At a very rapid pace of technical progress, the effects of labor displacement can then lead to structural unemployment—that is, unemployment that outlasts the depression period.”
Full shop-windows and idle furnaces at the same moment: the Depression, this 1931 lecture argues, is a crisis of abundance without purchasing power, not a shortage of goods, gold, or effort. Lederer catalogues its causes — cyclical overinvestment financed by credit outrunning real saving, world markets glutted by mechanized grain, rubber, coal, and copper, a swollen German labor supply after conscription's end, and labor-saving rationalization that no longer absorbs workers as the railways once did — then diagnoses why the usual liquidation fails. Cartels and trusts fix prices and quantities, dump losses onto competitive sectors, and block the price falls that would reallocate capital; wage-cutting proves largely a dead end. His verdict is that capitalist automatism has failed, leaving a fixed economy without a plan that only conscious social direction and economic self-government can set right.
Die kapitalistische Wirtschaft ist reich an kostspieligen Paradoxien.
English translation: “The capitalist economy is rich in costly paradoxes.”
That mass unemployment is proof of excessive wages, and that cutting wages will clear the labor market, was the reigning Depression orthodoxy Lederer set out to demolish in this 1931 lecture. He grants that a ruthless wage fall might absorb idle workers for a moment, then shows why the concession dissolves: shrinking consumption, technical unemployment that no compensation doctrine repairs, the combine harvester displacing labor faster than cheaper grain can reabsorb it. Against Cassel and Clark he insists the labor market cannot be read in isolation. In the German winter of 1930/31, with cartels holding prices rigid and plants idled by quota, wage cuts could only deepen deflation while strengthening the National Socialists whose rise frightened capital abroad. Unemployment, he concludes, is structural and institutional, not a mere error in the price of labor.
Eine Lohnsenkung vermehrt aber noch nicht den Absatz, sondern verschiebt nur die Kaufkraft vom Arbeiter auf den Unternehmer.
English translation: “A wage reduction, however, does not yet increase sales; it merely shifts purchasing power from the worker to the entrepreneur.”
By 1932 capitalism had, on Lederer's reading, long ceased to be a purely free economy: tariffs, cartels, subsidies, emergency decrees, and bank rescues had already rewritten circulation and investment. The real question was not whether planning should enter an untouched market, but whether the planning everywhere present would stay defensive and irrational or become conscious coordination. Free economy and planned economy, he argues, are opposites only in principle; in practice they interpenetrate. He proposes a planned emergency sector, idle factories and unemployed hands producing necessities distributed outside ordinary sale, and locates the true lever in credit, whose control becomes control over production itself. Planning, he insists, is not nationalization; a socialized firm still bound to the market must obey it. Against Mises he holds that prices, money, and consumer choice survive the plan, leaving economic calculation intact.
Das Problem der „Wirtschaftsrechnung“ in der Planwirtschaft ist also ein Scheinproblem.
English translation: “The problem of "economic calculation" in the planned economy is thus a pseudo-problem.”
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.”
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.