The Sociology of World War: War and Sovereignty in Emil Lederer

In his writings during the First World War, especially in The Sociology of World War (1915), the sociologist and economist Emil Lederer (1882–1939) focuses on how the war is revealing the real nature of the relationship between State and society. Rather than becoming a ‘community’, society proves to be an ‘abstract, organized multitude’, which can be incorporated into the organization of the military apparatus. This allows for a reinterpretation of the well-known distinction between the internal (society and its plurality) and external State (the State of power), that will pave the way for the pioneering analysis of the totalitarian State in Lederer’s last book, State of the Masses (1939).