1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Rather than assail Marx from without, this 1906 essay tests Capital against its own foundations, isolating four connected pressure points: the law of value, the analytical bracketing of competition, the derivation of a uniform profit rate, and the split between industrial and merchant capital. Lederer's wedge is Marx's own admission that labor creates value only in the right quantity and proportion relative to social need — a concession that, he argues, already pushes the labor theory toward marginal utility, demand, scarcity, and monopoly power. Following Böhm-Bawerk, and invoking Menger against explaining social facts from individual motives, he charges that Marx assumed capital's equalizing competition rather than proving it, and that merchant capital shapes prices exactly as industrial capital does. Exploitation may be a historical fact; it cannot be deduced from labor as the sole source of value.
Nicht die Arbeit an sich ist es also, welche Werte schafft, sondern nur die in bestimmter Proportion und Quantität auf die gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnisse verwendete Arbeit.
English translation: “It is thus not labor as such that creates values, but only labor applied in a definite proportion and quantity to the needs of society.”
Liberalism promised that free competition would dissolve society into isolated, harmoniously trading individuals; the reality, this 1913 survey argues, was the reverse. Capitalism shattered the old corporate bonds only to force workers, employers, salaried employees, officials, farmers, the Mittelstand, and consumers to regroup as organized classes, each pursuing the same aim — to organize the market by excluding competition within its own ranks. Lederer maps these associations across German society and extracts a durable concept: ideology as an interest group's double language, egoistic toward its own members, altruistic toward the state and the public. Unions draw depth from socialism, Christianity, or nationalism; employer bodies unite as counter-organizations; consumer cooperatives turn buying itself into class consciousness. Public life, he concludes, is increasingly governed by organized economic power rather than by liberal individual exchange.
Unter Ideologie ist hier und im folgenden das Gedankensystem verstanden, welches die Klassen und ihre Organisationen zur Begründung ihrer Interessen nach außen und innen aufgebaut haben.
English translation: “By ideology, here and in what follows, is understood the system of thought which the classes and their organizations have constructed in order to justify their interests both outwardly and inwardly.”
Written from a spring 1918 lecture and left unrevised through the November collapse it had almost anticipated, this compressed sociology of revolution begins from a paradox: revolution becomes possible only when an old apparatus of power still functions but has lost its inner recognition. Its defining formula is deliberately idealist — revolution is the breakthrough of an idea into reality — yet every genuine one needs two things at once, a universal idea and a social force it can mobilize. Lederer traces how intellectual strata charge ideas with emotion, why revolutionary violence always risks betrayal by terror and dictatorship, and how modern class organization makes the strike and the factory its central forms. Against historians who reduce upheaval to grievance or misgovernment, he insists the struggle is over social principles, and closes by distinguishing revolution, a spiritual turning point, from war.
Zweierlei ist jeder echten Revolution wesentlich: daß sie Idee ist und daß sie eine soziale Kraft mobilisieren kann.
English translation: “Two things are essential to every genuine revolution: that it is an idea, and that it can mobilize a social force.”
A short foreword to L. Galin's study of Russian courts and penal practice becomes, in Lederer's hands, an occasion to ask what law can be under Bolshevism. He opens by admitting he has never been to Russia and depends on sparse, contradictory reports, then advances a striking claim: even a revolution that ruptures every legal continuity generates continuity of its own, as old institutions, trained specialists, and popular habit reassert themselves. The dictatorship of the proletariat, he argues, has become institutional — sustained by leadership, propaganda, and transformed consciousness — yet has produced no genuinely new legal idea, an answer even Galin can give only unsatisfyingly. From that dissatisfaction he draws the essay's sharpest question: whether the Rechtsstaat itself is possible only within the bourgeois world.
So öffnet diese Darstellung den Ausblick auf die Frage: ob und inwieweit auch der Rechtsstaat nur in der bürgerlichen Welt möglich ist.
English translation: “Thus this account opens up the prospect of the question: whether and to what extent the Rechtsstaat too is possible only in the bourgeois world.”
At a moment when economics could not agree on its own object, this 1922 introduction sets out not to found a new system but to ask what abstraction the science actually requires. Its answer: theory is indispensable, yet its concepts are never timeless natural laws — they are constructions fitted to a historically specific order, the capitalist exchange economy, where access to goods runs through money-mediated exchange and homo oeconomicus is a working fiction. Lederer reconstructs the labor-value tradition — Ricardo's rent, Marx's distinction between labor and labor-power, surplus value, the equalized profit rate — as a powerful account of reproducible commodities, then delimits it: it cannot price scarce or monopoly goods. Marginal utility, resolving needs into ranked partial satisfactions, supplies the rest, and he reads classical, Marxian, and Austrian economics as partial theories of one and the same exchange order.
Für die Ware ist die Tauschfähigkeit das Wesentliche, so wie für das Gut: die Brauchbarkeit.
English translation: “For a commodity, exchangeability is essential, just as usefulness is essential for a good.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”