Abstract
While acknowledging the possible ‘cognitive advantage’ of all outsiders, Leszek Kolakowski, a philosophy don at the University of Oxford, recently pointed out that most modern intellectuals in exile have chosen their fate (which may induce guilt) often in preference to the ‘half-exile’, innere Emigration. The latter is the condition of man under the ‘unsovereign State’, the ambition of which ‘is to rob its subjects of their historical memory’.2 Both Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow chose to become refugees in 1933; both felt this as an existential necessity—in Röpke’s case permanently—and both wrote works in exile on a higher intellectual plane than had been possible hitherto. The freedom and polemical sharpness common to their otherwise very different styles stand in contrast to the oblique, elusively ‘value-free’, visibly painstaking terminology a Walter Eucken, the half-exile in Freiburg, would tend to favour under the Third Reich. Without these complementary experiences, the Germans might indeed have been robbed of their historical memory and denied the creative reformulation of principles mistakenly thought by them to be obsolete: a process of prevention and cure in which Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Walter Eucken played the roles, in Ralph Emerson’s sense, of representative men.3
I should like to thank Professor Hans Otto Lenel and Professor Hans Willgerodt for very valuable ‘Initialzündungen’.
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Notes and References
Leszek Kolakowski, Times Literary Supplement, 11 October 1985.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American writer, coined the term ‘representative men’ to denote individuals who could encapsulate an epoch or a type of human being.
Leonhard Nelson, ‘Was ist Liberal?’ Speech given on 23 November 1908, at the inauguration of the ‘Akademische Freiburg’, of which Alexander Rüstow was a founder member.
Alexander Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. III: Herrschaft oder Freiheit (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1957) pp. 29 and 538.
Rudolf Eucken, Lebenserinnerungen (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1921) pp. 77 and 118.
Wilhelm Röpke, Gegen die Brandung (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1959) p. 46.
Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. I: Ursprung der Herrschaft (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1950) p. 10.
Röpke, The German Question (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946), translated by E. W. Dickes, introduction by Friedrich A. von Hayek, pp. 68–9.
Gerald Feldman, ‘Industrieverbände und Wirtschaftsmacht’, in Feldman, Vom Weltkrieg zur Weltwirtschaftskrise (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1984) pp. 152–4.
Contribution to the discussion at the conference of the Verein für Sozialpolitik. The discussion is reported in Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Berlin, Vol. 170, 1924, pp. 71 et seq; Vol. 172, 1926, pp. 244–5.
Rüstow, Rede und Antwort (Ludwigsburg: Martin Hoch, 1963) pp. 56 et seq. This posthumous collection has the best bibliography.
See Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952) pp. 165 et seq.;
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) pp. 152 et seq.;
and Karl Heinz Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1974).
The discussion is reported in Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Vol. 182, 1930, pp. 190 et seq.
The discussion is reported in Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Vol. 187, 1932, pp. 188 et seq.
Rüstow, ‘Selbstkostensenkung, Lohnabbau und Preisabbau’, Deutscher Volkswirt, Berlin, 11 July 1930.
Harold James, ‘Gab es eine Alternative zur Wirtschaftspolitik Brünings?’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Leipzig, Vol. 70, 1983.
Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 97.
Hanns-Joachim Rüstow, ‘Der Papen-Plan 1932’, appendix to: Walther Hubatsch, Entstehung und Entwicklung des Reichswirtschaftsministeriums 1880– 1933 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1978) pp. 43–6.
Hanns-Joachim Rüstow, Theorie der Vollbeschäftigung in der freien Marktwirtschaft (Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1951).
Alexander Rüstow, ‘Die Arbeitslosigkeit in der deutschen Maschinenindustrie’, in Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Vol. 185, 1933, pp. 38, 43, 60, 66 and 82.
Röpke, Der Weg des Unheils (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1931), passim but especially pp. 83 and 114.
R. J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932–38 (London: Macmillan, 1982) p. 24.
Röpke, ‘Nationalsozialisten als Feinde der Bauern: Ein Sohn Niedersachsens an das Landvolk’, in Gegen die Brandung, op. cit., pp. 84 et seq.
Ibid., p. 17.
The discussion is reported in Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Vol. 187, 1932, p. 69.
Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Breslau, W. G. Korn, 1934) p. 20.
Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1954) pp. 501, 511, 546.
Otto Monckheimer, ‘Durch Nationalsozialistiche Wirtschaftsgesinnung zu geordnete Wirtschaft’ (through National Socialist economic ethos to an ordered economy), in Jahrbuch für nationalsozialistische Wirtschaft, 1935, p. 11.
R. Walther Darré, Um Blut und Boden (Munich: Zentralverlag der Nationalsozialistichen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, 1941) pp. 517 and 514.
Röpke, ‘Die natürliche Ordnung’, in Mass und Mitte (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1950) p. 157.
Röpke, The German Question, op. cit., p. 46.
Franz Böhm, Die Ordnung der Wirtschaft als geschichtliche Aufgabe und rechtsschöpferische Leistung (Stuttgart and Berlin, W. Kohlhammer, 1937) pp. 5 and 12.
See also Eucken, Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1940) p. 16.
Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933) p. 41.
Schmitt, Nationalsozialismus und Völkerrecht (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1934) p. 5.
Eucken’s own discussion of this judgment is to be found in his Unser Zeitalter der Misserfolge (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1951) p. 6, his last contribution to ‘the problem of economic power’.
See also Edith Eucken-Erdsieck’s essay, ‘Franz Böhm in seinen Anfängen’, in Heinz Sauermann and Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker (eds), Wirtschaftsordnung und Staatsverfassung (Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1975).
See Edgar Salin, ‘Walter Eucken’, in his Lynkeus: Gestalten und Probleme aus Wirtschaft und Politik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1963) p. 48.
Edith Eucken-Erdsieck, ‘Prolog’, in Ordo, Vol. I, 1948, pp. 11 and 14.
Böhm, op. cit., and Friedrich Lutz, Das Grundproblem der Geldverfassung (Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1936) pp. xii, xvii–xviii.
Eucken, Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1954); 1st edn, 1934, p. 4 and passim.
On the Austrians, see Stephan Böhm, ‘The Political Economy of the Austrian School’, in Piero Roggi (ed.), Gli economisti e la politica economica (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1985) p. 256.
Eucken, Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen, op. cit., p. 41.
It should be remembered, of course, that Vesalius and Galileo practised the method of resolution and composition centuries before Edmund Husserl.
See Fritz Machlup, ‘Idealtypus, Wirklichkeit und Konstruktion’, in Ordo, Vol. 12, 1960–61, pp. 21–57.
Eucken, ‘Die Überwindung des Historismus’, in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch, Vol. 63 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1938) p. 83.
Most important were Eucken’s articles in the Ordo yearbook and, in particular, the essays, ‘The Problem of an Economic and Social Order’ and ‘Technology, Concentration and the Ordering of the Economy’. These articles, together with some previously published material were published in the book Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik (Bern and Tübingen: Francke and J. C. B. Möhr [Paul Siebeck], 1952) which was edited after his death in 1950. There is also a long essay entitled ‘On the Theory of the Centrally Administered Economy: an Analysis of the German Experience’, in Economica, London, Vol. 15, 1948, Part I, pp. 79– 100 and Part II, pp. 173–93 and lectures which were published posthumously under the title This Unsuccessful Age (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1951).
Eucken, Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie, op. cit., pp. 2, 8 and 12. The treatment of economic processes in time preoccupied Eucken throughout the war years during which he published two important papers on the subject. The discussion that had continued in the work of John Hicks at Oxford and others ever since Friedrich von Hayek’s introduction of the notion of intertemporal equilibrium in 1928, was neglected by Eucken although he was, in general, remarkably well informed about the work of von Hayek, John Hicks and other economists in England. See Hayek’s article in Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Vol. 28, 1928, which is translated in his Money, Capital and Fluctuations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). I am indebted to a paper by Stephan Böhm on this.
Eucken, Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie, op. cit., pp. 16 and 266 et seq. Though he denies any intentional pessimism, Eucken quotes such pessimists as Jakob Burckhardt and Arthur Schopenhauer often. For example, on p. 14: ‘Thus the intellect is daily bewitched and bribed by the juggling of desire.’
Ibid., Parts 2 and 3.
Ibid., Part 3.
Ibid., Part 3.
According to Hans Willgerodt, Rüstow would say ‘Der Brave freuet sich der Tat, nur die Lumpen sind bescheiden!’ (the brave man enjoys the deed, only the knaves are modest) exhorting liberals to defend their achievements.
Fritz Neumark, Zuflucht am Bosporus (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1980) pp. 72–85.
Alexander Rüstow wrote his three volume universal history and cultural critique Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart while Röpke wrote Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft in 1937 and his wartime ‘trilogy’ or ‘tetralogy’ if we include The German Question, written just after the war.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1946) p. 497. I am grateful to J. P. Stern for the mention of Auerbach.
Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 26.
Auerbach, Mimesis, op. cit., pp. 25 and 498.
Rüstow, Das Versagen des Wirtschaftsliberalismus (Düsseldorf and Bad Godesberg: Küpper, 1950).
Röpke, Gegen die Brandung, op. cit., p. 83.
Röpke, Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft 2nd edn (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1943) especially chs 1, 2 and 3 passim.
Röpke, Gegen die Brandung, op. cit., p. 109.
Röpke, Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1948),
Internationale Ordnung-heute (Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1954) pp. 195, 201 and 208.
In such works as Otto Rühle’s massive Illustrierte Kultur- und Sittengeschichte des Proletariats (Berlin: Der Neue Geist, 1930).
Röpke, Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft, op. cit., p. 183.
Röpke, Civitas Humana (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1948) p. 136.
The conditions envisaged were those in Denmark which had indeed served as the model for the historian, Barthold Niebuhr’s depiction of the Roman peasant-soldiers in his history.
Röpke, Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart, op. cit. ; Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. I, p. 54.
Röpke, Internationale Ordnung-heute, op. cit., pp. 19, 108, 294 et seq., 343, 332–3, 145, 152, 59, 52 et seq.
This view is directly opposed to that of General Scharnhorst and later reformers who had a concept of Kampfgemeinschaft (association for fighting) based on freedom rather than authority. See Röpke, The German Question, op. cit., p. 88; Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. III, op. cit., p. 409.
Eucken, ‘On the Theory of the Centrally Administered Economy: an Analysis of the German Experiment’, loc. cit., p. 79; and Unser Zeitalter der Misserfolge, op. cit.
Röpke, The German Question, op. cit., p. 106.
Rüstow also paid tribute to Franz Oppenheimer, the liberal socialist who influenced him profoundly; Oppenheimer influenced Röpke and Eucken to a lesser extent. Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. IIop. cit., p. 387; Röpke, Gegen die Brandung, op. cit., p. 334.
Röpke, Internationale Ordnung-heute, op. cit., p. 88.
Röpke, ‘Herrschaft oder Freiheit?’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 17 November 1957.
These were also themes of Röpke while Eucken disproved the causal link between technology and concentration.
Carl Schmitt’s book on the Leviathan as a political symbol was doubtless not unknown to him. See Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938).
H. Fuchs (ed.), Goethe und Lavater, Briefe und Tagebücher (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1901) p. 212.
Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, Vol. III, p. 523. The extent to which Rüstow’s historical sensibility had been influenced by the Jugendbewegung, Eugen Rosenstock and other figures consciously opposed to earlier liberalism (‘Paleo-liberalism’ was Rüstow’s term) is revealed in his conviction that ‘mankind finds itself today before a unique, hitherto unprecedented and unrepeatable predicament, an eschatological situation in the fullest apocalyptic sense of the word’. Ibid., p. 524.
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Johnson, D. (1989). Exiles and Half-exiles: Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Walter Eucken. In: Peacock, A., Willgerodt, H. (eds) German Neo-Liberals and the Social Market Economy. Trade Policy Research Centre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20148-8_3
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