Abstract
Lantink concentrates on analyzing Wilhelm Röpke’s wartime trilogy, classifying it as a missing link in German social philosophy. The trilogy incorporates patterns of thought that can be found in the cultural pessimism of the 1920s, among others in Oswald Spengler. Their rhapsodic textual form resonates with the “intellectual novel” as conceived by Thomas Mann. Röpke is also compared to Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Röpke’s social utopia shared with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon both objections to centralism and sympathies for small farmers and artisans. Here Lantink reminds how Switzerland already served as an ideal for nineteenth-century anarchists. In addition, Röpke’s volumes are compared to the wartime publications of Hayek and of Adorno and Horkheimer. Finally, Lantink explores Röpke’s ideological relevance for the postwar Christian Democratic Union in Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
“There is nothing pontifical about this offer of guidance. It purports nothing more than that as many as possible should be spared the years of mental struggle and the diverse errors through which the author himself had to pass before he attained to the degree of understanding which he believes himself to possess today” (Röpke 1942, p. 7).
- 2.
“We adhere to the natural division into diagnosis and therapy, interpretation and action” (Röpke 1942, p. 16).
- 3.
“The renaissance of liberalism springs from an elementary longing for freedom and for the resuscitation of human individuality. It is a liberalism which should not be regarded as primarily economic” (Röpke 1944, p. 50).
- 4.
“Politico-cultural liberalism […] is the primary, and economic liberalism the secondary consideration. This primary liberalism might be described as sociological” (Röpke 1944, p. 51).
- 5.
“Let us hope the present book will be understood in this sense. It continues the efforts which started in the earlier book” (Röpke 1944, p. 29).
- 6.
To put it more bluntly, these texts are far too long as essays for the modern reader. An extreme example is the boundless length of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. To note a contemporary example of the “intellectual novel,” Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History was also much more readable as an article than the lengthy monograph he wrote after the initial success.
- 7.
An expression Oswald Spengler used for his own cultural position.
- 8.
“It can hardly be denied that the problem of the aberrations of rationalism is to a certain extent a specifically French one” (Röpke 1944, p. 116).
- 9.
“And so we observe those collectivist social engineers […] who quite openly commit themselves to the perspective of ‘society as a machine’, and who would thus seriously desire to realize the nightmare of a veritable hell of civilization brought about by the complete instrumentation and functionalization of humanity” (Röpke 1944, p. 137).
- 10.
An exception is Bonefeld (2014) who makes a comparison with the negative dialectics of Adorno and Horkheimer.
- 11.
Written in 1943–1944, the first edition was published in 1947 by the Dutch publisher Querido in Amsterdam.
- 12.
Note that this is an expression not used by Röpke or Hayek.
- 13.
See Spengler (1919) as the expressionist political manifesto where he first used the term “socialism” as “salonfähig” for the Right.
- 14.
“These remarks are intended to show once more the kind of measures with which the defense and re-establishment of economic liberty and the accompanying battle against selfish vested interests must be conducted in order to fulfil our counter-program of the ‘Third Way’” (Röpke 1942, p. 288).
- 15.
“If there be such a thing as a social ‘right’, it is the ‘right to property’, and nothing is more illustrative of the muddle of our time than the circumstance that hitherto no government and no party have inscribed these words on their banner” (Röpke 1944, p. 284).
- 16.
“Finally, the Prussification of Germany was greatly furthered by the manner in which the evolution into a modern industrial State took place in Germany. […] This German ‘capitalism’ was not one of the Marxist pattern, but the historically unique and, we may fairly say, dismally distorted form in which the modern industrial system developed on German soil in a Greater Prussian Empire” (Röpke 1945b, pp. 226–227).
- 17.
“We have always committed ourselves not to a passive, but rather to an active pessimism” (Röpke 1944, p. 32, emphasis in the original).
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Lantink, F.W. (2018). Cultural Pessimism and Liberal Regeneration? Wilhelm Röpke as an Ideological In-Between in German Social Philosophy. In: Commun, P., Kolev, S. (eds) Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966). The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68357-7_13
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