Wilhelm Röpke asked how to address the problems of social fragmentation and the loss of community feeling, in a world where the market is left to itself. Röpke’s own idea was that society is nurtured and perpetuated at the local level, through motives that are quite distinct from the pursuit of rational self interest. Two [...]
American culture is surely decadent. Its decay is palpable to any sensitive observer who reads the feuilleton section of the local newspaper or attends a university. But is our decadence terminal? Is our civilization on a collision course with extinction? The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun (200 pages, Wesleyan University Press, 1989) Politically America [...]
The irony of the prosperous decade of the 1950s is that the most popular person on the most visible proof of that prosperity—television—was a Catholic Bishop: "America’s Bishop," Fulton J. Sheen, who rejected feel-good, dishwater Christianity and instead boldly proclaimed the truth to his audience, 70% of whom were non-Catholic. Happiness, says the wicked Ambrose [...]
What constitutes a well-ordered house from the national perspective? How do we know what order it is in? According to the conventional wisdom we need the statistics of aggregate income, spending and output. We need, in other words, the GNP approach whose figures bombard us whenever we read something about the national economy on particular [...]
Wilhelm Röpke maintained that freedom depends upon certain social and moral factors, which are essential for a free enterprise system to be successful, enduring, and truly free. A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, by Wilhelm Röpke, Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998. 200 pp. Wilhelm Röpke (in some texts spelled “Roepke”), [...]
While Hilaire Belloc often describes the type of economy he is advocating as “distributist,” he also refers to it as “proprietary,” due to the idea that a truly free economy requires the widest distribution of private property as possible. The recent esays on distributism and the many comments in response raised a number of interesting [...]
Whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or orthodox Protestant, the Bible is the basic book of the Christian faith. One may well ask if it has anything to say about how we should live, not only about the fruits of salvation, but about what kind of government we are to have or what kind of economy? [...]
In the annals of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that have become established as models due to tone, insightful content, and excellence of style. The most recent historical work by Jacques Barzun is such a work. It is a cultural history of the highest standard. As a historical volume of such scope, [...]
Wilhelm Roepke was the principal champion of a humane economy: that is, an economic system suited to human nature and to a humane scale in society, as opposed to systems bent upon mass production regardless of counterproductive personal and social consequences. Today I offer you some observations concerning Wilhelm Roepke, a principal social thinker of [...]
Wilhelm Röpke grew mesmerized by population growth projections which counted 300 billion inhabitants on the Earth by the year 2300. In such an anthill existence, he asked, what would happen to those “unbought graces of life”: “nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure.” Wilhelm Röpke was an [...]
Counting upon God’s grace, we must recognize and respect the organic nature of man, full of vivacity, spontaneity, and unpredictability. This is the essence of a truly organic—that is, living—society. An element of organic society involves the manner in which remedies are found. In searching for solutions, we must carefully observe the fact that organic [...]
It is the perennial task of the conservative to disentangle the truth from the weeds of confusion which keep growing up around it. Samuel Francis and Patrick Buchanan have greatly contributed to the present resurgence of conservative elements rising up in America. Whatever political victories may come of their work should certainly be celebrated. “Go [...]
Alessandro Manzoni’s gift for seeing the humorous, pathetic, and anger-making aspects of a world in which justice is difficult to find ought to be more recognized. But it is no wonder that what attracts people are the faith, hope, and love that are both the hidden foundation and crown of political and economic life. Alessandro [...]
Adam Smith, the father of the discipline we now refer to as economics, was a moral and political philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and contemporary and acquaintance of Edmund Burke. Long heralded as a proponent of self-regulating markets, limited government, and free-market “capitalism,” Smith is often invoked by proponents of corporate capitalism as an archetype [...]