Lederer predicted rising white-collar share would split society into rulers and dependents.

Evidence

Lederer vacillated between two basic assumptions. The first was that the disappearance of every vestige of self-determination, and the experience of acquiring ever greater control over ever more comprehensible processes of production, would one day unite blueand white-collar workers in an attempt at a fundamental restructuring of the economic order which had condemned them to dependency upon it. Lederer’s second assumption was that, to the extent that, among individuals who were `not self-employed’, the proportion of white-collar workers and officials was increasing in relation to blue-collar workers, there was a growing tendency for society to split into an ever smaller number of rulers and ever greater number of those dependent on them. The tendency would be to react to this by supporting a hierarchical social structure in which passionately defended status differences would rigidify in whatever rudimentary form. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 465

Categorization

• XREF: Lederer’s dualist thesis resonates with the later Frankfurt School distinction between domination and dependency structures — relevant to the reader’s critical theory reference synthesis.