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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Wilhelm Röpke on Liberalism, Culture, and Economic Development

Authors : Nils Goldschmidt, Julian Dörr

Published in: Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966)

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Goldschmidt and Dörr claim that Wilhelm Röpke’s “cultural pessimism” is not merely a diagnosis of his time but that it can also provide guidance to economics today. His observations regarding the interconnectedness of economic development and culture demonstrated the importance of social processes for economics. Goldschmidt and Dörr highlight the societal structures to which Röpke conferred importance for economic development, connecting this assessment to his views of a sustainable liberalism as an occidental cultural ideal. In addition to Röpke’s apologetics for Western culture, as exemplified by studying his attitude to South African apartheid, approaches to a culturally sensitive view of other regions can also be found in his work. Especially this “other Röpke” makes him valuable to contemporary cultural economics.

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previous chapter Cultural Pessimism and Liberal Regeneration? Wilhelm Röpke as an Ideological In-Between in German Social Philosophy

next chapter Skepticism About Markets and Optimism About Culture

This paper relies heavily on Goldschmidt (2010). We would like to thank Mark McAdam for the editorial work.

For the research program of “cultural economics”, see Goldschmidt (2006).

Although Röpke was not alone in using a criticism of “multitudes” as a starting point for the development of a research program, as this extended to other neoliberals as well, the systematic meaning of Röpke in this respect has hardly been examined. Every indication suggests that liberals did not understand “masses” as social stratification but as a (degenerated) intellectual disposition which is juxtaposed against the idea of personality. For a fundamental and convincing exposition, see Dathe (2008).

The power of the masses leads to the destruction of finely tuned societal structures, as Röpke describes in The Social Crisis of our Time (Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart): “The disease which has been holding Western society in an ever firmer grip […] is characterized by a process of social decomposition and agglomeration” (Röpke 1950, p. 10).

Röpke adopts the character of the “homo insipiens gregarious” from José Ortega y Gasset (Röpke 1979 [1942], p. 11).

Röpke later integrated it as the first chapter in the collection Maß und Mitte (Röpke 1979 [1950]).

What must appear today as a bizarre “village or garden plot romanticism” (Röpke (1979 [1944], pp. 283–291) can be explained by Röpke’s belief in the reconnection of society to the experiences within a community. In his view, structures of civil society are tied to the actual experiences of daily life which require freedoms outside of the market.

What Röpke describes here is typically what one would identify with the Enlightenment. In this manner, Röpke entraps himself in a contradiction: in spite of the Christian roots he emphasizes, the lasting liberalism he posits first became possible as a fruit of the Enlightenment and political liberalism of the eighteenth century. Röpke, on the other hand, separates political and intellectual liberalism, thereby retrospectively elevating an apparently lasting liberalism.

In a certain sense, Röpke seems to negate the distinction between individual ethics (“virtues”) and social ethics (“just structures”). He does not seem to entertain the criticism that “an open society” cannot be based on the “morality of a small crowd” (Hayek 1996 [1988], pp. 7–26; Hayek 2004 [1979], pp. 54–57; Hayek 2003 [1973–1979], esp. pp. 239–242).

The quest for the creation of rules for society as a whole based on the well-being of its citizens is the central concern of modern “Ordnungsökonomik” and Constitutional Political Economy, respectively. For an overview, see Vanberg (1994) and Vanberg (2008).

In light of the necessary moral requirements of the market, Röpke writes in A Humane Economy: “It is also necessary that people should grow up in conditions which favor such moral convictions, conditions of a natural order, conditions promoting co-operation, respecting traditions, and giving moral support to the individual” (Röpke 1998 [1960], p. 125). He emphasizes—advocating the idea of “informal institutions”—the importance of historical cultural regions as necessary societal contexts for individuals. In demarcating his views from a “rationalist” perspective, he writes polemically: “It will be no easy task for us to convey our rationalist friend and to dissuade him from glossing over such minutiae as space and history in constructing a free-floating and arbitrarily associating individual” (Röpke 1979 [1944], p. 110).

This developmental process holds for Röpke as much as for society in general (for his reference to Hayek, see, e.g. Röpke (1947), p. 24) as well as for the economy in particular (Röpke 1979 [1944], pp. 57–60).

Thus, for Röpke, “specialists of the West are essential, not only as temporary advisers, but as permanent and leading persons” (Röpke 1961, pp. 31–32).

Röpke’s explanation as to why this insight has hardly become widely recognized is convincing as well: “The reason for it is that these preconditions seem obvious and given to a person in the West, thus hardly being aware of them, while the leaders in undeveloped countries only see the economic success of the West, without knowing or suspecting the intellectual-sociological preconditions for it” (Röpke 1961, p. 30).

And later, in almost identical wording, in Rheinischer Merkur (Röpke 1963b).

Röpke used the occasion of a collected volume of a lecture series “to thank Hunold for the great service he had rendered through his courage irrespective of the zeitgeist or the inevitable harsh criticism that was certain to set in, and that instead of the frequently heard and unusually distorted one-sidedness the topic of ‘Africa’ was receiving due justice” (Röpke 1965, p. 125).

For Alberto Alesina, for example, taking into account of a “cultural dimension” is constitutive for a contemporary modern political economy: “Where do institutions come from? What is the origin of certain political institutions? How quickly do institutions change? What is the role of culture in explaining economic outcomes and developments? How does culture evolve? What is the role of ethnic identity in explaining economic conflict, success and failures?” (Alesina 2007, p. 3).

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Title: Wilhelm Röpke on Liberalism, Culture, and Economic Development
Authors: Nils Goldschmidt
Julian Dörr
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966)
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68356-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-68357-7

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68357-7_14