2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
More salaried employees need not mean greater power for each employee. In this 1926 contribution to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, Emil Lederer and Jakob Marschak examine how expanding industrial and administrative organizations make clerks, technicians, and officials collectively indispensable yet individually more replaceable. Their central tension is between middle-class status and the economic dependence shared with wage workers. Bringing occupational statistics into conversation with legal protections and trade-union practice, they trace how war, inflation, and narrowing prospects of independence undermine that status. Civil servants sharpen the problem: pensions and tenure protect them, while obligations to the state constrain collective action. The study distinguishes movement toward a common wage-earner position from political unity, showing why hierarchy, credentials, and institutional loyalties continue to divide economically dependent groups.
Restoring a currency’s old value does not restore everyone’s purchasing power at once. In this 1926 review of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, Emil Lederer endorses the critique of Britain’s return to gold, but gives particular weight to the sequence of adjustment: wages fall before prices, making workers pay for monetary stability. Monopoly and unequal social power, he argues, obstruct the smooth adjustment promised by abstract economic models. His distinctive move is to draw a political implication from Keynes’s proposal to make wage cuts conditional on corresponding price reductions: such an agreement would implicitly recognize workers’ claim to preserved real wages and society’s capacity to secure them. The review connects a concrete currency dispute to the possibility of deliberately shaping income distribution.
Every restriction of contractual freedom imposed in favor of workers: that, at its most general, is what Lederer and Marschak mean by Arbeiterschutz, which they place at the juridical core of social policy under industrial capitalism. Worker protection is not paternal charity but a legal limit on the formally free contract, making the employment relation itself an object of public intervention. Their longest analysis concerns working time, the classic breach in liberal contract freedom, from bans on child and women's labor through Sunday rest to the postwar eight-hour day and the Washington Convention. Truck prohibitions, minimum-wage boards, factory inspection, and occupational-disease law extend the account, until enforcement passes to unions, works councils, and labor courts as much as to statute. A closing section carries it into the ILO founded under Part XIII of Versailles.
Am unmittelbarsten und elementarsten zeigte sich die verheerende Einwirkung des Industriesystems und der Einführung von Maschinen auf Kinder und Frauen.
English translation: “The devastating impact of the industrial system and of the introduction of machinery showed itself most immediately and most elementally upon children and women.”
Industrial capitalism gathers workers under shared technical and disciplinary conditions, so that, Lederer and Marschak argue, their conduct can never be explained by the isolated choices of classical market theory. Workers react not as individuals but as a class, and the labor market itself is transformed once unions and employers' associations bargain as collective subjects. Collective agreements move to the center of the analysis: they translate antagonism into general rules, and autonomous bargaining typically precedes the law that later codifies it. From this the study follows the whole institutional apparatus, from strikes and lockouts, conciliation, and yellow unions to works councils, labor exchanges, and the reach toward economic self-government. First drafted in 1913 and expanded by Marschak through the 1920s, it binds the workplace formation of class to the larger problem of governing a modern economy.
Der „Arbeitsmarkt“ ist jetzt nicht mehr unter dem Bilde einer Auktion oder eines Bazars aufzufassen, mit individuellen Käufern und Verkäufern, sondern die Gesamtheit von Arbeitern und Unternehmern ist es, welche zu je einem Subjekt zusammenwächst.
English translation: “The "labor market" is now no longer to be conceived on the model of an auction or a bazaar, with individual buyers and sellers; rather, it is the totality of workers and of entrepreneurs which coalesces into a single subject on each side.”
A diagram can show how prices and quantities depend on one another without explaining the social relations they express. This distinction guides Emil Lederer’s 1927 review of Enrico Barone’s theoretical economics in its German edition. Lederer welcomes Barone’s graphical method as training in rigorous thought, yet questions what equilibrium analysis leaves unexplained. His treatment of interest makes the objection concrete: capital’s capacity to yield a surplus does not by itself explain why interest exists. Neither rejecting formal theory nor accepting its explanatory sufficiency, Lederer asks readers to recover the economic circumstances behind its constructions. This short review offers a precise account of what mathematical discipline can contribute to economic understanding—and why it needs historical and social interpretation alongside it.
Industrial capitalism, in Emil Lederer’s account, threatens the family and village solidarities that earlier conquests of China had left intact. Yet their disruption also creates new possibilities for collective action through factories, unions, student organizations, and a political party. Writing in 1927, Lederer asks what makes this upheaval more than another cycle of dynastic collapse. His distinctive emphasis falls on the social foundations of state power: how people secure livelihoods, acquire education, and organize beyond inherited obligations. The Kuomintang’s coalition of workers, intellectuals, and nationalist business interests becomes a test of whether new solidarities can sustain public authority despite sharpening class conflict. Read as a contemporary interpretation rather than a settled history, the article offers a concrete account of the connections Lederer draws between industrialization, political organization, and China’s capacity to resist foreign domination.
Compulsory protection against sickness, accident, invalidity, and old age marked, for Lederer, something historically new: neither charity nor the older law shielding workers at the bench, but the incorporation of wage earners into state-organized security. He traces its origins to Bismarck's conservative answer to socialist agitation and the Sozialistengesetz, weighs Brentano's liberal objections, and identifies compulsion as the decisive innovation that voluntary mutual aid could never supply. Comparative chapters set Britain's approved societies against Soviet Russia's employer-financed system; accident insurance, he argues, matters most where it shifts industrial risk onto the Berufsgenossenschaften. After the war, inflation and mass unemployment loosen the tie between contribution and benefit, turning insurance into public provision. Part of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, the chapter reads social insurance through a set of durable oppositions: insurance versus provision, compulsion versus the self-administration of the insured.
Mit Recht sieht man in der Unfallverhütung ein volkswirtschaftlich wichtigeres Ziel als in der Unfallentschädigung.
English translation: “Accident prevention is rightly regarded as an economically more important goal than accident compensation.”
Does Marx's sharp line between capitalist and proletariat still describe Weimar Germany? The answer, delivered to an organized employees' milieu, is that the basic relation holds — the mass remains separated from the means of production — but the proletariat is no longer a homogeneous body of factory hands. It is a stratified class of workers, salaried employees, civil servants, technicians, and small rentiers, deliberately divided by rank, title, and the old authoritarian state's politics of teile und herrsche. Mechanization expands output without expanding manual labor, so only by fusing workers, employees, and officials into one Arbeitnehmerschicht does the dependent population become a democratic majority. Salaried employees may not yet call themselves proletarian, Lederer argues, but they increasingly share the proletariat's fate — and emancipation requires unity without erasing internal difference.
Der gesellschaftliche Zustand ist das Werk des Menschen, er ist gestaltet, ist gestaltbar und umgestaltbar.
English translation: “The condition of society is the work of man; it is shaped, it is shapeable and reshapeable.”
Every endogenous theory of crisis, this 1928 essay contends, must in the end become a theory of disproportion — not a hunt for one privileged cause but an inquiry into which mismatches harden into cyclical form. Lederer locates the decisive asymmetry in unequal elasticity: raw materials and profits rise faster than wages, salaries, and interest, so accumulation shifts the social product away from consumption even as real wages climb. Ordinary discrepancies self-correct through price and capital movements; crisis begins only when a distributive disproportion becomes rigid and resists the market's usual repair. Banks and technical innovation amplify the swing. Against those who would cure a slump by lending alone, he warns that producer credit cannot conjure the final purchasing power output needs, and that noninflationary recovery would demand a degree of coordinated planning beyond the ordinary banking system.
Eine Diskrepanz der Einkommen aber löst keine Gegenbewegung im Angebot der Arbeitskräfte aus.
English translation: “A discrepancy in incomes, however, triggers no counter-movement in the supply of labor.”
The Far East, and Japan above all, appears here as the site where a world-historical rupture becomes visible: the collision of a closed, tradition-saturated civilization with the expansive forces of European industrial capitalism. Refusing both romantic Asia-enthusiasm and European condescension, Lederer and his co-author Emy Lederer-Seidler reconstruct Japanese life from within, from Shinto and ancestor cult to Tokugawa aesthetics, the forty thousand characters that discipline a childhood, and samurai loyalty transferred to the emperor at Meiji. Modern imported capitalism, they contend, corrodes precisely these bonds, detaching a new industrial proletariat from family, myth, and national-religious community. The later chapters turn economic: cultivable land scarcity, tenant rents of half the harvest, feudal capitalism concentrated in Mitsui and Mitsubishi, and armament spending hidden in opaque budgets. The crisis they diagnose is not mere Europeanization but the emergence of an Asian capitalism.
Niemand existiert außerhalb der Gruppe.
English translation: “No one exists outside the group.”
More intensive cultivation need not make a farm more viable. In this report of a 1929 Heidelberg institute excursion to Pomerania, Emil Lederer, Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg, and Svend Riemer examine estates whose technical efforts collide with poor soils, costly transport, depressed prices, and debt. Estate visits and accounts—given particular prominence by the Pommerscher Landbund’s invitation—support a crucial distinction: preserving existing owners is not the same as securing agricultural production. The authors also test proposed remedies against their human costs. Smallholdings may survive through unpaid family labor; estate economies may depend on low wages and restrictive employment arrangements. Readers encounter agricultural rescue as a conflict among profitability, property, and livelihoods, rather than a simple choice between efficient large estates and independent peasant farms.
The forty-hour week, this 1931 lecture to the German trade-union congress in Frankfurt insists, is no narrow bargaining demand but a response to a capitalism transformed by crisis. Depression at twenty-five percent unemployment differs in kind, not merely degree, from earlier downturns: postwar technical change swept through raw materials, agriculture, transport, and mining at once, cartels and tariff walls held organized prices high while starving smaller export firms of credit, and no automatic compensation reabsorbs the workers machinery displaces. Lederer rejects both autarky, which for a modern nation means poverty and dependence, and isolated currency manipulation in an interdependent world. If technical progress permanently shrinks the necessary volume of labor, work must be shared more evenly — and leisure, rather than mere rest, becomes a terrain of education, solidarity, and emancipation for the working class.
Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.
English translation: “It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.”