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 [...]
Willmoore Kendall’s support of (relative) free speech is an integral part of his view of the “deliberate sense of the community,” which in turn is informed by the “public truth,” which itself is the political expression of the particular American historical experience of transcendent revelation. “[B]ut a completely open society in which everyone does his [...]
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”), [...]
Wilhelm Röpke developed what was called “humane economics,” which placed the dignity of the human person at the core of economic thought, theory, and practice. Wilhelm Röpke In August 1938, as the world teetered on the brink of a second World War, only twenty years after the ending of the previous global conflagration, a [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Edmund Burke allowed his fear of the French Revolution to cloud his judgment of a fitting response to the needs of agricultural workers. He was blind to the dangers of monopoly and concentration of economic power, to the possible ways of intervening that conform to the character of a market economy. “The mistakes which have [...]
Romanticizing and moralistic contempt of the economy, including contempt of the impulses which move the market economy and the institutions which support it, must be as far from our minds as economism, materialism, and utilitarianism... Editor's Note: The following excerpt comes from Wilhelm Röpke's excellent book, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, first published [...]
Wilhelm Röpke infused his detailed analyses of modernity with a sensitive respect for the values of tradition and religious faith and their critical importance in building social and economic order. Born in 1899 in Schwarmstedt, Germany, Wilhelm Röpke would become one of the most distinguished economists of his age. Acknowledged as a worthy peer by [...]
If we are to know and rebuild a conservative civil social order in this country, then we need to “rake from the ashes” of recent American history the books that influenced a generation of conservative scholars and public figures, books whose message resonated with much of the American populace and resulted in astonishing political triumphs. [...]
That boredom, sexual perversion, consumerism, and the general malaise of the West are to a great extent the fruits of past economic growth is long recorded… “Conquest or superiority among other powers is not, or ought not ever to be, the object of republican systems.” —Charles Pinckney of South Carolina The Rise of Neo-Mercantilism. [...]