Revival: Cartels, Concerns and Trusts (1932)

Book excerpt: This volume makes available to English readers the best known and most frequently quoted study of industrial combination from the German point of view. There is an abundance of literature on the trusts, from economists who have lived close to that evolution, and the trusts, by their more challenging position, were for two decades the centre of the discussion which turned on what in industry was safe for democracy. Meanwhile, in Germany, the alternative of the cartel was having a less noticed a controversial development, until in Westphalia there was created, out of lower forms, a working model which was new and unique in the manner in which it related producers to each other and to the market. In only a few industries has this model been fully established; but it presents a rival type to the trusts, and places the problem of combination on a different basis of analysis and tendency. The distinction between these two forms may be a matter of industries, or of national law and psychology; or they may work together, the cartel being the general envelop within which fusions are created, the types are nevertheless distinct, so much so that ‘rationalization’, as a general term, rather denotes than defines them both. IN America, the Cartel is illegal, so that industry has sought its administrative solution in fusions; in England trusts and cartels co-exist; in Germany, they are interlaced, great trusts having their feet in one cartel, their shoulders in another and their heads in a third.