1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.”
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.”