Lederer, Emil, 1882-1939

Dr. Emil Lederer was born July 22, 1882, in Pilsen, Austria. He was graduated from the Pilsen Gymnasium and went on to study at the University of Vienna, which Menger, Bhmm-Bawerk and Wieser were making famous as the center of the marginal utility school of economic theory. At the University of Berlin, he specialized in law and economics. He took his doctorate in jurisprudence at Vienna and in political science at Munich.

After World War I, Lederer was a member of the Federal Socialization Commission in Germany and was chief of the Economic division of the Austrian State Commission for Socialization. He also practiced as a consulting economist and was economic counsel for leading trade unions and industrial organizations in Germany.

He became an associate professor at Heidelberg in 1918 and a full professor in 1922. During this period, he wrote many publications aiming, at a synthesis of the psychological theory of the Austrian School of Böhm-Bawerk and the objective theory of Karl Marx, drawing his training at Vienna, which was noted at that time for critical analysis of Marxian economics. His chief work, Principles of Economic Theory, was first published in 1922. From 1923 to 1925 he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan, where he made a study of the Japanese economy, and in 1931 be became Professor of Political Science in Berlin.

Lederer was the chief aide of Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, in the organization of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School. They had become acquainted while Dr. Johnson was associate editor of The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, when Dr. Lederer contributed many articles to that publication. In the spring of 1933, when the Nazis began dismissing internationally known scholars from German universities, Dr. Johnson conceived the idea of establishing in New York a "university in exile" which would preserve German methods and contributions in a coherent unit. He invited Dr. Lederer to New York that June and made arrangements with him. Dr. Lederer returned to Europe and assembled the faculty, which became a nucleus of a group of German, Austrian, Italian, and Spanish scholars. Dr. Lederer, who was professor of Economics, was elected first dean of the Graduate Faculty and served for two years.