Emil Lederer

Lederer grew up in Pilsen (today Plzeň) as the son of the merchant Philipp Lederer and Sophie Schwarzkopf, and went to Vienna to study in 1901. There he attended lectures in law and economics by Eugen von Philippovich, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser and Carl Menger; in the summer semester of 1903 he moved briefly to Berlin to study under Gustav Schmoller. He took his doctorate in law (Dr. iur.) in 1905 in Vienna, and a second doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) in 1911 in Munich under Lujo Brentano, with a study of the pension insurance of salaried private-sector employees. His 1912 habilitation in Heidelberg, "Die Privatangestellten in der modernen Wirtschaftsentwicklung" (Salaried Employees in Modern Economic Development), established his profile as a theorist of the "new middle class": the first comprehensive empirical and sociological study of the occupational and political consciousness of the salaried class. At the same time Lederer was editorial secretary from 1910, joint managing editor from 1918, and from 1921 to 1933, together with Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Weber, co-editor of the "Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik" (Archive for Social Science and Social Policy), the most important German-language journal in the social sciences of those years. In 1918 he became associate professor and in 1922 full professor in Heidelberg, and from 1923 to 1925 an exchange professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo. From 1923 to 1931 he directed, together with Alfred Weber, the Heidelberg Institute for Social and Political Sciences; Karl Mannheim completed his habilitation there in 1926 under the supervision of Lederer and Weber. As Werner Sombart's successor in the Berlin chair of political science (1931), Lederer was among the most prominent academic Social Democrats of the Weimar Republic. Schumpeter called him the "leading academic socialist of Germany in the 1920's". Suspended by the National Socialist regime in April 1933, he emigrated by way of Paris and London to New York, where, together with Alvin Johnson, he founded the "University in Exile" at the New School for Social Research, of which he remained the first dean until his sudden death after an operation in 1939. His principal work on business cycle theory, "Konjunktur und Krisen" (Business Cycles and Crises; 1925), developed a disproportionality theory following Tugan-Baranowsky; his posthumously published "State of the Masses" (1940) is regarded as an early analysis of totalitarian mass politics.