On Wilhelm Röpke, William F. Buckley Jr., and their world — our world
When Bill Buckley esteemed someone, I paid attention — paid attention to the person who was the object of Buckley’s esteem. That’s how I first heard about Wilhelm Röpke. I mean, I first heard his name from the lips of Bill.
Röpke was a German economist, social critic, and political thinker. He was a leading free-marketeer and classical liberal. In America, he would often be known as a “conservative.” When it comes to conservatism, the question is, “What do you want to conserve?” Röpke wanted to conserve Enlightenment values, broadly speaking. He wanted to conserve, or defend, liberalism against illiberalism.
An age-old, never-ending battle.
On Monday, January 30, Samuel Gregg had a piece at Law & Liberty on Röpke. The date was not accidental. Gregg was commemorating a lecture that Röpke gave on January 30, 1933. Mr. Gregg, I should note, is affiliated with the American Institute for Economic Research, among other institutions.
It was “at considerable personal risk,” he writes,
that a young German economics professor delivered a public lecture in Frankfurt am Main, just eight days after Hitler took office, in which he made clear his opposition to the new government.
Gregg continues,
Wilhelm Röpke was already known as an outspoken critic of Nazism. He had even personally campaigned against the Nazi Party. “You will be complicit,” he wrote in one 1930 election pamphlet, “if you vote Nazi or for a party that has no reservations about forming a government with the Nazis.” That pointed “or” was a shot at those conservative political and military elites who, three years later, would allow Hitler into office under the illusion that they could control him.
Was Röpke a defiant Jew, or a member of some other threatened minority? Was he fighting for his own life, in a sense? Writes Samuel Gregg,
It would not have been difficult for Röpke to adapt himself to post-January 1933 German political realities. For one thing, he was not Jewish. Moreover, Röpke was a decorated combat veteran who had served with distinction in the trenches on the Western Front. Young and athletic, he even looked like the Aryan Übermensch extolled by Nazi ideology. At the age of 24, Röpke had become the youngest professor in Germany and by 1933 his fame as an economist was European-wide. Had Röpke been willing to compromise, he could have gone far under the new regime. Röpke’s February 1933 lecture, however, indicated that he was not going to bend. From that moment on, he had no future in the Third Reich.
He may not have been an “Übermensch,” as the Nazis conceived such a person. But what a mensch, if I may.
(I will never forget what David Pryce-Jones told me about Robert Stolz, the Austrian composer who was anti-Nazi and risked his neck to help victims, or potential victims, of the Nazis. “He wasn’t Jewish, he was just a decent guy,” said P-J. He said it with some emotion. I will never forget it.)
About Röpke’s general views, Gregg writes the following:
Liberalism, he said, involved a belief in “every individual’s human dignity” and “the profound conviction that man must never be degraded into an object.” That, Röpke said, was why liberalism rejected the oppression of people because of their race or religion. A coherent conception of tolerance itself was impossible, he noted, without an in-principle affirmation of every individual’s inherent dignity — not least because it ruled out treating one’s political opponents as “enemies” who belonged to a different group, and who would ultimately have to be reduced to the status of non-citizens or expelled from the body-politic altogether.
Anyway, I recommend reading the entire essay. In its concluding paragraphs, Gregg speaks of the immediate post-war years and our present day. Maybe I could quote one more sentence, because it’s so interesting, and important:
. . . alongside his insistence on the necessity of embracing a market economy, Röpke invested just as much time explaining why his country and the West (more generally) had to embrace the civilizationally-grounded liberalism that he had defended in his February 1933 lecture.
Many times, Wilhelm Röpke contributed to National Review. Bill Buckley, his admirer, saw to that. Röpke’s last contribution appeared in the March 8, 1966, issue of NR. In that same issue was his obituary.
The obit was written by Ludwig von Mises, another great liberal economist, born in Galicia. I’m afraid I can’t link to the obit. It is in the NR archives. But I can type out some excerpts.
Mises begins,
Wilhelm Röpke belonged to the generation of Germans who grew up in the time of the First World War and the fantastic inflation of the years following it. He studied at the universities of the German Reich, most of whose teachers of the social sciences and of the humanities in those days eagerly propagandized the ideas that a few years later Hitler popularized in Mein Kampf. It was the grand old man of German university economics, Werner Sombart, professor at the University of Berlin, who in his last book proclaimed that the Führer gets his orders directly from God, the Führer of the Universe, and that Führertum means a permanent revelation.
Quite an environment.
In such an environment the young Wilhelm Röpke preserved his critical acumen. He noticed the fallaciousness of his teachers’ doctrines and carefully perused the books they condemned. And he had the courage to promulgate his own ideas, although he knew very well what consequences he would have to face. He was one of the first professors the Nazis fired.
Summing up, Mises writes,
Students of the evolution of economic thought will one day give a detailed account of Professor Röpke’s contribution to scientific knowledge. Those who had the privilege of studying under him will always remember what they owe to this eminent teacher. His friends and colleagues will never forget what his friendship has given to them. But the future historians of our age will have to say that he was not only a great scholar, a successful teacher, and a faithful friend, but first of all a fearless man who was never afraid to profess what he considered to be true and right. In the midst of moral and intellectual decay, he was an inflexible harbinger of the return to reason, honesty, and sound political practice.
Even today, it occurs to me, there are “inflexible harbingers.” I could name a few, but that would be to exclude others, right? Bill Buckley often said this. He usually said it in Latin: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius.
When news came of Röpke’s death, Buckley devoted his column to him — devoted his syndicated column to an appreciation of Röpke. The heading: “Death of a Titan.” I’m afraid I can’t link to this one either. But it is findable at the Buckley archive, here.
“On February 12, at age 65,” Bill begins, “a great man died whose benefactions are as considerable for the United States as those of any European now living.” As he proceeds in his column, he quotes Ludwig Erhard, who, with Konrad Adenauer, established the modern Germany. “Wilhelm Röpke,” said Erhard, “stands as a great witness to the truth. My own services towards the attainment of a free society are scarcely enough to express my gratitude to him who, to such a high degree, influenced my position and conduct.”
At the end of his column, Buckley writes, “Mr. Röpke was, I note proudly, a personal friend. We visited several times in Switzerland.” Röpke was “unheeded by much of the academy” and “surrounded by Philistinism,” writes Buckley. But what good he performed, and what an example he set. “He was a true conservative, a great teacher, a fine husband and father, a credit to his university, to his profession, and to his beloved humane society.”
Samuel Gregg published his essay at an outlet called “Law & Liberty.” I once asked Robert Conquest — the great historian and writer — how he would describe himself, politically. He said, tentatively, “‘Burkean conservative’ would do.” But then he had a second idea. Orwell spoke of the “lands of law and liberty.” “That’s what I am,” said Bob. “A law-and-liberty man.”
In his column, Buckley refers to Röpke’s “masterpiece,” namely, Economics of the Free Society. He quotes one passage from it:
It is incumbent upon us to make use of every available means to free our society from its intoxication with big numbers, from the cult of the colossal, from centralization, from hyper-organization and standardization, from the pseudo-ideal of the “bigger and better,” from the worship of the mass man, and from addiction to the gigantic. We must lead it back to a natural, human, spontaneous, balanced, and diversified existence.
There are such riches in that book, and in Röpke generally. I’m glad to have been reminded of him. Very.