Emil Lederer

Emil Lederer (1882 to 1939) was a Bohemian-born German economist and sociologist who connected economics and sociology and was regarded as the most important supporter of interdisciplinary social science in Heidelberg. He studied law and national economy at Vienna, took a doctorate at Munich in 1911 and habilitated at Heidelberg in 1912, where he became a full professor in 1920 and, from 1923 to 1931, co-directed the Institute for Social and State Sciences with Alfred Weber. In 1931 he succeeded Werner Sombart at the University of Berlin. A democratic socialist and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, he was influenced by Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, studied class structure and the inefficiencies of monopolies, and put forward a stagnation theorem about technical progress. Suspended by the Nazis in 1933, he fled via London to the United States and co-founded the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research, serving as its first dean until his death in 1939. His books include Die Soziologie der Gewalt (1919) and The State of the Masses (1939).