Campbell – Wilhelm Roepke and the City of Man

Wilhelm Roepke and the City of Man

William F. Campbell

Louisiana State University

Introduction to the Transactions Press edition of The Moral Foundations of Civil Society, New
Brunswick: 1996, formerly published as Civitas Humana, 1948. For footnotes and bibliography
see the Transactions Press edition.

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Civitas Humana (German edition in 1944; English edition in 1948) is the
second book of Wilhelm Roepke’s trilogy. It followed The Social Crisis of Our
Time. The final volume in the trilogy is International Order and Economic
Integration (German edition in 1945; English edition not until 1959). Why
should anyone pay attention to these books? Why should they be reprinted?

Let us begin by paying attention to the words civitas humana in the title. The
Roman word, civitas, reflects the Greek traditions of the polis, or the city
appropriate to man. Each polis has a way of life appropriate to the character of
the citizenry. Although Roepke recognized the validity of the nation in the
modern world, he was constantly trying to find the smaller platoons of society
in which real allegiances and loyalties were to be developed. He would never
have recommended such cosmopolitan entities as a world state.

The humana side of the title would best be understood in terms of the Christian
humanism of an Erasmus or More rather than the more modern understandings
of secular humanism. But he always understood that he was not constructing
the City of God, or a church. He knew his limitations as well as his strength; he
was a social scientist and not a religious prophet. He was no St. Augustine. He
left the Civitas Dei, the City of God, to others.

His concern was the institutional embodiment of the spirit rather than the spirit
directly. But he understood and agreed with those of his critics who argued that
a "genuine cure is not to be found in institutional reforms but only by a deep
and sincere self-examination on the part of each single individual. The only
really decisive question is, out of what ultimate depths of the soul is this
Metanoia to be produced?" (xxii)

It would be an interesting indicator of the times to find out how many
economists know what the word, metanoia, means. The turning around of the
soul toward God is a necessary part of conversion. But Roepke knew that the
darkest nights of the soul as well as the darkest nights of world history stem
from internal infection rather than external invasion. Men can be held
responsible for their internal corruptions even if they cannot control the external
blows which come to them.

The role of intellectuals in forming the internal rot was a constant theme of
Roepke. The clerks of the Middle Ages became the treasonous clerks or
intellectuals of the modern world. He was closer to the medieval concept of the
clerks than to the modern concept of an intellectual; but Roepke was ever the
loyal clerk and the castigator of the treasonable clerks. His courage in
confronting his opponents he did not consider exceptional because of the fact
that intellectuals have a special responsibility to call things as they are.

In calling things as they are, he also believed that simplicity and a non-technical
language were essential. He persistently refused to hide behind the jargon of
economics or any other discipline to soften the impact of his thought and
words. As Richard Weaver said it, "language is sermonic."

He also recognized the dangers of extreme specialization in an era when the
soundess of society as a whole could not be taken for granted. When the basic
needs of society have not yet been met, it is irresponsible to indulge in such a
luxury good as overspecialized work.

Roepke recognized that the need was for synthesis. For this reason, he would
never have won a Nobel prize in economics even though he was far and away
the soundest economist of the twentieth century. I say this because he
understood the limitations as well as the strengths of his discipline.

Synthesizing requires originality and imagination, but these qualities are often
misunderstood. Synthesis is not the textbook writer’s ability to stitch together
miscellaneous materials. In Roepke’s case it was inspired by a vision of the best
that Western Civilization has to offer.

Let me therefore take as the main thread of this introduction the historical vision
of Europe and America which Roepke offered to us.

Europe is not well-defined geographically. It is perhaps better defined as a
resistance movement against the lure of the Orient. The lure of the large empires
or the eastern pull on Europe was a temptation to the ancient Greeks and has
remained one ever since. Roepke would have understood the resolute advice
which Hecuba, the mother of Hector and Paris, gave to Menelaus as to what to
do with his beautiful Helen of Troy:

Kill your wife, Menelaus, and I will bless your name.

But keep your eyes from her. Desire will win.

She looks enchantment, and where she looks homes are set fire;

she captures cities as she captures the eyes of men.

We have had experience, you and I. We know the truth.

In this account by Euripides of The Trojan Women, Hecuba lets Helen of Troy
have it with accusations of lust and luxury which she claims:

…it made your senses itch. You thought,

being queen only in Argos, in little luxury,

that once you got rid of Sparta for the Phrygian city

where gold streamed everywhere, you could let extravagance

run wild. No longer were Menelaus and his house

sufficient to your spoiled luxurious appetites.

Men’s search for comfort and security always makes us vulnerable to the
totalitarian temptation. But Helen is not without her defences. She does admit
that her behavior looks bad at least on the surface, but she muses:

Why did I do it? What made me run away from home

with the stranger, and betray my country and my hearth?

As an excuse for her actions, Helen hides behind "unintended consequences"
on the utilitarian level. When Paris had to judge of the three lovely goddesses as
to their beauty, Helen describes the blandishments or temptations of public
power which they offered to him:

Pallas Athene would have given him power, to lead

the Phrygian arms on Hellas and make it desolate.

All Asia was Hera’s promise, and the uttermost zones

of Europe for his lordship, if her way prevailed.

But Aphrodite, picturing my loveliness,

promised it to him, if he would say her beauty surpassed

all others. Think what this means, and all the consequences.

Cypris prevailed, and I was won in marriage: all

for Greek advantage. Asia is not your lord; you serve

no tyrant now, nor take the spear in his defense.

Now what would Roepke have thought of Helen’s sophistical defence? He was
always critical of Machiavellian sophistry of the ends justifying the means or
realpolitik. He might have been thankful for the outcome, i.e. Europe not being
enslaved to Asia, even though he would have sternly disapproved of the
immorality of Helen’s actions.

What would have happened to the world if Paris had managed to resist all three
temptations as Christ did with three similar temptations in the desert? Christ had
to reject power, influence, and the ability to dazzle the masses by turning stones
into bread. Roepke understood along with Solzhenitsyn that the resistance to
Communism had to be far deeper than what he coined as the "standard of
life-ism" argument. In fact his explicit words are relevant here:

Far truer and far more relevant is it to say that man lives not by bread alone,
but–and the words of the gospel are singularly appropriate as they stand–`by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ (St. Matthew IV.4); and
these, be it noted, are the words that St. Matthew put into Jesus’ mouth in
answer to the man who challenged him to turn stones into bread.

The temptation of deifying the state and its rulers also characterized Hellenistic
Greece. Roepke was always distrustful of the totalitarian movement toward the
insect state, the Pharaonic model provided by ancient Egypt. He is on the side
of Demosthenes against Alexander the Great, but would never have lost his
balance or civic virtue to be on the side of Diogenes, the cosmopolitan cynic,
who was not a citizen of any concrete polity. The state of nature was more
appropriate for yapping dogs than for civilized human beings.

Roepke’s resistance to the Pharaonic State is also clearly found in the men he
most admired. You can tell an author by his heroes. Who were Roepke’s guides
in his reflections on ancient history?

It is interesting to note that he cites many who werehistorians like Gibbon and
Jacob Burckhardt; even more narrowly some of them were economic historians
like Luigi Einaudi and Rostovtzeff. But my personal favorite is the unsung Italian
historian Guglielmo Ferrero. Roepke in discussing the reception of his earlier
book The Social Crisis of Our Time goes so far as to say that, "what gave me
especial pleasure was that a few months before his death, Guglielmo Ferrero
offered me his unreserved appreciation as an historian and sociologist." (xvi)

Now why should he have valued his opinion so highly? Ferrero was an historian
of European civilization with emphasis upon ancient Rome. He provided an
interpretation of history and Western civilization which was compatible with
Roepke’s vision. Personal morality and responsibility, nourished by the family,
was his key to understanding the developments of Roman history. He dedicated
an entire book to the women of the Caesars.

Similarly, Roepke favored Cato over Caesar which is not to say that he was a
sour Catonist as we shall see later. His distrust was always toward the "strong
men of history." In a particularly illuminating passage from the Social Crisis,
Roepke focusses on:

The value which an era places on Caesar, Alexander, Cromwell, Richelieu or
Napoleon, typifies it as a whole and there is nothing more characteristic of the
century of the colossal than that, like the seventeenth century before it, it looks
up, awe-stricken, to this type of man and his works. While in the sixteenth
century (which in its turn, is so very similar to the eighteenth), Montaigne had
reproached Caesar most disrespectfully…and whereas Montesquieu had bluntly
talked of the `crimes de César,’…the nineteenth century again begins to
discourse mysteriously on the `missions’ of the conquerors and to build up a
veritable cult around the Caesars. Even Mommsen wrote his Roman History in
this spirit, as did Droysen his history of Alexander the Great, …Hand in hand
with the over-estimation of the successful, we find a corresponding
under-estimation of those, who, like Demosthenes offered unsuccessful
resistance to the conquerors. It is a hopeful sign for our own time that it has
again brought the yardsticks of the eighteenth century down from the attic and
begins to note the negative side of the conquerors and their deeds, that it
criticizes the imperators and tyrants–the Alexanders, Caesars, Richelieus,
Napoleons and others of their kind–and sees their opponents (from
Demosthenes and Cato to Talleyrand, Madame de Staël, and Constantin Frantz)
in a new light. It is only today that we have reached the point where, following in
Gibbon’s footsteps, we are once more prepared to add up dispassionately the
terrible liabilities of the Roman Empire.

Both Ferrero and Roepke understood what St. Gregory understood about the
Fall of the Roman Empire: "in its heart it had already withered." It fell because
of internal infection and not because of the invasion of the barbarians. Its slide
into collectivism and the insect state–the succumbing to the constant temptation
of the totalitarian Orient–was what characterized the post-Augustan age. The
taste for luxuries, novelty, and the cult of the colossal had corrupted the
household and family. Liberty had run into license.

Before leaving the internal rot of the Roman upper classes, it is important to
stress that Roepke is always the man of moderation. It might be thought that in
his reaction against Helen of Troy, the Alexander the Greats and the Caesars of
the world, that he relapsed into a sour puritanism. Like Adam Smith, Roepke
was personally somewhat Spartan and rugged in his personal life, but he
understood the danger of the intellectuals with the "lean and hungry look" like
the Brutuses and the Catos.

Wilhelm Roepke maintains a steady vigilance against what he called the "glum
philosophy" which was the secret of all collectivist regimes. He was steadfastly
opposed to forced savings as he saw it attempted in post World War II Europe;
"austerity" reminded him of the moral equivalent for war problem. It would
work under war or siege conditions but not for a well-functioning economy.
The hostility to luxury goods which surfaced after World War II was a return to
the heroic spirit of mercantilism which stressed manufacturers. He criticized the
politicians who give "their speeches the dignified accents of unworldly
asceticism and patriotic concern." In many ways Roepke can be compared to
Edmund Burke who also had to confront prophets of doom and gloom in the
18th century. We like to think that the sourness of the eco-freaks is unique to
the 20th century, but there is nothing new under the sun. Consider the words of
Edmund Burke in the Letters on a Regicide Peace:

I know, too, the obstinacy of unbelief in those perverted minds which have no
delight but in contemplating the supposed distress and predicting the immediate
ruin of their country. These birds of evil presage at all times have grated our
ears with their melancholy song; and, by some strange fatality or other, it has
generally happened that they have poured forth their loudest and deepest
lamentations at the periods of our most abundant prosperity. Very early in my
public life I had occasion to make myself a little acquainted with their natural
history.

In the same letter he also has the following passage which illustrates the concern
for future generations which the wise conservative has:

Hitherto we have seen the superfluity of our capital discovering itself only in
procuring superfluous accommodation and enjoyment, in our houses, in our
furniture, in our establishments, in our eating and drinking, our clothing, and our
public diversions: we shall now see it more beneficially employed in improving
our territory itself: we shall see part of our present opulence, with provident
care, put out to usury for posterity.

Roepke accepted the usual economic considerations which condemned this
discouragement of luxurious imports and encouragement of manufactured
exports on the basis that they would lead to a misallocation of precious
resources. But in addition his final criteria was more supply-sided than anything
else. If you did not allow consumers to buy the luxury goods, they would buy
leisure and work less.

Another reason why Roepke did not succumb to the sour, ascetic tendencies of
the pagan Romans was that he was a Christian. The main resistance to the
Pharaonic spirit was provided by the loosening of the social soil that
Christianity provided.

Roepke might not only be considered a pre-Reformation Christian, but also a
pre-Reformation classical liberal. He was a Lutheran Protestant and not a
Roman Catholic even though he was very sympathetic to the balanced social
teachings of the Catholic Church.

Roepke’s analysis of the importance of Christianity is very similar to
Christopher Dawson’s:

This is not the place to value the immeasurable contributions of the Church as
an institution which, during the darkest days of the Middle Ages, kept the spark
of culture burning under the ashes and by so doing laid the foundation for
everything else, a mission without which Europe would have become a mere
peninsular of Asia.

Roepke like Dawson perceived that Christianity and pagan antiquity also
provided the "spiritual and moral capital" out of which the ideas of economic
and political liberalism flourished. This led him to the rather dire forecast:

The Christian element, however, which predominated in this heritage has, since
the beginning of modern times, been subjected to a continuous process of
secularization until finally the power of faith, which had at first consciously and
then unconsciously nourished the secularized concept of progress, rationalism,
liberty and humanity, began to flag, thus becoming responsible for the withering
of those very concepts, since no alternative sources of faith and certainty had
been provided.

But what do we make of the Christian and Catholic social teachings of the
Middle Ages? There is still a temptation to view this teaching through the lens of
an R.H. Tawney which makes out the medieval scholastics to be defenders of
landed aristocracy and feudalism, a would-be organic corporate state. Roepke
had no leanings in this direction. As we are finding out today, medieval
Scholastic thought is much more market oriented than we ever gave it credit for.
I do not recall Roepke ever discussing the breakthrough discussions of
Raymond de Roover, John Baldwin, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, but his vision
would be completely compatible with theirs.

Similar to the Scholastics Roepke thought that the feudal-absolutist heritage was
an incubus. Although no egalitarian, he was quite willing to radically change the
conditions which brought about inequality–"monopoly, privileges, feudal
landownership, etc." In this sense his sympathies were with the Distributist
movement as advocated by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in England. All
these movements are based on the love of private property and the belief that it
should be as widespread as possible. They are far from fostering smoldering
envy and resentment of the redistributive ethic which begrudges any deviations
from dead-level equality.

He does reject feudalistic accretions of capitalism and what he calls a "worn-out
liberalism." In other words the status quo of a decayed market economy was
not to his liking. We have to give Roepke credit for a radical kind of
conservatism similar in spirit to the good-natured temperament of a G.K.
Chesterton. In fact, there are some striking similarities between Chesterton and
Roepke in their appreciation of the vices,–yes, vices–and virtues of the middle
ages. In both cases, the emphasis is on what might have been or what should
have been, rather than an uncritical admiration of what was.

Economically the guild organization of cities was susceptible to abuse in
monopolistic and restrictive directions. Roepke shared the hostility toward
monopoly and guilds expressed by the liberalism of the Catholic social teaching
of the medieval schoolmen.

Roepke would have been very pleased with the Papal Encyclical (Centesimus
Annus) on the economy which sounds exactly as if the author had listened to
Roepke’s sympathetic treatments of Papal teachings over the years. He steadily
interpreted the Church’s teaching as pro-private property and anti-communist
and even anti-socialist; he reprimanded those who interpreted the Church’s
teaching in a collectivist, corporatist direction.

To give an example from Civitas Humana, Roepke says:

"that a careful reader of the celebrated but much misunderstood papal Encylical
`Quadragesimo Anno’ will find a social and economic philosophy expressed
therein which at heart comes to much the same conclusion…[as my] liberal
conservatism." (xvii)

But the teachings of the Church both in the Middle Ages and the 19th century
are one thing; the realities of man and society are another. The dependency and
servility of the individual to a feudal lord or to the omnicompetent state have
been the norm rather than the exception. Roepke saw clearly:

"There are enough millenaries of recorded history behind us to teach us in the
most unequivocal manner that whenever in their dark course the light of
freedom, progress and humanity shines it was a period when a sufficient
number of people had private property to enable them to throw off their
economic dependence on the feudal lord, or–even worse perhaps–the state.
Those periods of emancipation and enlightenment would have been impossible
without the existence of a large bourgeoisie in that noble but now almost
forgotten sense which brings it into a more than philological relationship with the
term `civilization.’ It lies with us whether or not one of the longest and most
brilliant of these periods shall now come to an end like all its predecessors."

Roepke’s devotion to the small city state and trading republics lies in opposition
to the Statist tendencies of the Renaissance. His spirit is in the tradition of
Erasmus and Sir Thomas More rather than that of Machiavelli.

What would have happened to Germany, for example, if the Hanseatic
free-trade conception of economics had triumphed over the historical form
which Germany actually adopted, the protectionist and monopolistic policy of
heavy industries; what would have happened if there had been small farms
instead of the large estates of the Prussian Junkers?

An answer to these questions can be found in many ways in America in the 18th
century. In many ways the "novus ordo seclorum," (the new order of the ages)
which is emblazoned on the Great Seal of the United States was made possible
by the fact that we did not have to suffer a landed aristocracy in this country.
Furthermore we were not creating a Machiavellian order based on an evil use of
power.

Roepke’s partiality to the 18th century reflects his correct understanding of the
Federalism written into the United States Constitution. Limited governmental
power, and the diffusion of the important powers to their lowest possible levels
was the essence of Roepke as well as the vision of the founding fathers.

Although he was not a simon-pure libertarian on the functions of government,
he always wanted to decentralize and demassify society as much as was
feasible.

With respect to landed aristocracy and privilege, Great Britain has endured
much grief and resentment due to these centralizing tendencies. Here again
Edmund Burke’s "Letter to a Noble Lord" comes to mind. It is suffused with
many rueful reflections on the way in which the family of the Duke of Bedford
acquired his great estates from Henry VIII.

The United States’ "new order of the ages" also owed much to the fact that the
founding fathers learned much from their examinations of earlier European
history. We owe much to the Church and our Christian heritage, but Roepke
warns us to be wary of Caesaro-Papism, a rigid despotism both temporal and
spiritual. On its religious side it not only rigidified Byzantium and Russia, but a
similar fusion of church and state in the Arab world also explained the
petrification of an earlier, brilliant, decentralised Mohammedan civilisation.

Roepke also was dubious of the more secular forms of Caesaro-Papism which
he finds in Hobbes and Rousseau who provide a theologico-political fusion in
the name of national unity and civil religion.

The constitutional structure of the United States and the correct interpretation of
the First Amendment would benefit from Roepke’s understanding. Our
unwillingness to countenance anestablished church, at least on the Federal level,
does not stem from any iron wall of separation of Church and State, but a
distrust of concentrated power. Roepke was a strong supporter of the type of
Federalism that we created in the United States.

Roepke believed that the attention to the scale of human activities was perhaps
best achieved in the 18th century. What happened in the 19th to cause it to lose
its balance and moderation? Scientism and romanticism were two opposite and
equally repulsive alternatives which Roepke saw dominating the century.

Scientism and positivism enshrined in Saint-Simon’s technocratic City of Man
are the real sources for collectivist economic planning. Marx was only a
vituperative critic of Capitalism and not a constructive thinker. Collectivism is
capable of great things in the cult of the colossal or what Roepke calls technical
productivity, but it is not capable of economic productivity, i.e. producing
those things which consumers really want. Drawing on Goethe’s Faust, he says,
"We may compare autocratically controlled collectivist state economy with the
`Homunculus’ of Wagner’s retort."

Roepke rejected the scientism which tries to reduce the social sciences to the
methods of the natural sciences. He constantly railed against the "eternal
Saint-Simonism" which believed that the market could be improved on by
importing scientific experts. If I may draw again here on Edmund Burke,
Roepke’s insights here were very similar to the ruthless insights of Edmund
Burke on the hardness of heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician:

Their humanity is at their horizon–and, like the horizon, it always flies before
them. The geometricians, and the chymists bring, the one from the dry bones of
their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that
make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes, which are
the supports of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they
are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the danger, which
may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers, consider
men in their experiments, no more than they do mice in an air pump, or in a
recipient of mephitick gas. What his Grace may think of himself, they look upon
him, and every thing that belongs to him, with no more regard than they do
upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal, that has been long the game of
the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed
philosophers, whether going upon two legs, or upon four.

Roepke was always critical of the French intellectuals who contended that the
French genius was to be found exclusively in its analytical power. But, alas, in a
melancholy fashion they were resigned to the idea that their inheritance from the
Greeks included their political inheritance as well as their spiritual heritage. This
was done in "the guise of modern Graeculi, as victims of spiritual and artificial
`raffinement’–a state of being which in the long run is not consistent with
political power that had better been left to the more robust Macedonians and
Romans."

Roepke was always on the alert to the irrationalist positions which might be
thought to be the opposite extreme from scientism. Here too he did not want to
throw out the baby with the bath water. For example, he believed that
romanticism and mystical elements were an inescapable part of human nature,
indeed, "among the eternal tendencies of mankind," but they could become
"dangerous the moment" they breach "the dike of reason." He distinguished
many forms of mysticism each of which was capable of excess–the
nature-loving, the erotic, the religious, aesthetic, and democratic-social. Each of
these are legitimate up to a point. Economists are always tempted to take the
easy way out, by denying reality to aspects of human existence by reducing
them to arbitrary and subjective tastes and preferences. Roepke never does this.
This is his strength. He realizes that all of these are legitimate aspects of human
experience which must be satisfied in a balanced and harmonious social
existence. Nature, sex, religion, beauty, and politics are all meaningful as part of
the whole. When they attempt to become the whole, then there is mischief.

Roepke realized that the reaction against the bourgeois ethic was an essential
part of the Romantic movement. Roepke maintained a healthy distrust against
the two extremes of moralism and of nihilism. Nihilism had perhaps a strong
support in the response of Nietzsche to his domestic and bourgeois
environemnt. One of Nietzsche’s aphorisms declares, "Our youth was up in
arms against the soberness of the age. It plunged into the cult of excess, of
passion, of ectasy, and of the blackest and most austere conception of the
world." Roepke would have refused this plunge because "the logical end of
romanticism could only be the longing for death."

J.N. Figgis has pointed out that Nietzsche was revolting against the

"domestic pettiness of a small provincial town. He was in reaction against his
aunts…Wearied with domestic virtues he calls men to Alpine heights of danger
and triumph, despising above all things utilitarian democracy and the optimism
of inevitable progress, with its gospel of the sofa-millenium."

Roepke, like another of his mentors, Adam Smith, shared the fear of the
sofa-millenium, but he did not degenerate into the hardness of the Machiavellian
will-to-power which Nietzsche admired in Bismarck or Prometheus as a
barbarian from the heights. Thomas Carlyle similarly reacted against bourgeois
liberalism by worshipping Frederick the Great. As we have already seen Roepke
sturdily distrusted the cult of the colossal in all its forms–music, politics, art,
and the cult of personality.

The Collectivism of the 20th Century

The seeds of totalitarian thought which were spread in the 19th century bore
fruit in the 20th century. Although Roepke was an uncompromising
anti-communist, he was more fundamentally an anti-collectivist of all stripes. He
describes collectivism as a "social philosophy which would extend the authority
and coercive powers of the State to the utmost and hence presupposes a
distinction between ruler and ruled, those who give orders and those who obey
them." However, even here, Roepke would make distinctions between different
types of collectivists. He understood that the totalitarian collectivists were a
different and irrreconcilable breed in comparison to the non-totalitarian
collectivists. Rational discussion with the totalitarians was not possible; the
ignorance of socialists might be impressive but it was not invincible.

The motives of collectivists are similarly various. Reflect on his wise
observation in Civitas Humana:

"In collectivism there seems to be at the same time hidden away a further power
of attraction which one might characterise as aesthetic and artistic. If we are not
mistaken, what so charms the artistic sensibility about collectivism is its
apparent symmetry, its system which on paper is so beautifully rounded off;
and there is perhaps also the romance in the `mailed fist’ which it indeed
presupposes."

Just like Adam Smith in analyzing the motives of the men of system, he
understood the complexity of such mixtures of self-interest, aesthetic,
technocratic, humanitarian, and quite frankly the simple lust for power.
Compare Roepke’s analysis to Adam Smith’s shrewd observation in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments:

"The man of systems, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit,
and is so often enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of
government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He
goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to
the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to
imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as
much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he
does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle
of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the
great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of
motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might
choose to impress upon it." The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759.

Notice that neither Smith nor Roepke assume the worst or set up straw men
when analyzing the democratic socialists. Even though he was sceptical of the
consistency of the "democratic socialist" label, he assumed their motives to be
honorable and paid more attention to their anti-capitalist criticism than most
libertarians would find desirable.

But most forms of progressivism whether Marxist or liberal shared in the leaning
toward the East. Fate replaced human responsibility, massification replaced the
proper human scale, and man replaced God.

Roepke always denied fate or necessity to the trends of history. There was no
Marxian trend toward larger units of enterprise dictated by economies of scale.
Arguing against the "skyscraper principle" in architecture and the economy, he
stated as long ago as 1936:

"In still very important sections of our economic system, i.e., in agriculture, in
the small trades and the like, nothing of this sort is going on. But even in the
case of industry it can be argued that the trend towards bigger units has, very
often, less to do with real advantages derived from the increased size of the unit
than with a certain megalomania which has been such a characteristic trait of the
`gay twenties,’ with consequences which have become only too manifest during
the present depression."

In some ways similar to George Gilder he was optimistic that many of the
technological changes such as the:

"spread of the electromotor and the gasoline engine–has in many directions,
exerted even a lowering influence on the optimum size. In this connexion it
should not be forgotten that, for example, the automobile signifies after all the
triumph of the small unit over the larger one, so far as the business of
locomotion is concerned."

Although I suspect that his enthusiasm for modern technology might have been
a little more discrete than George Gilder’s, he would have shared his enthusiasm
for the Microcosmic aspects. Beneath Gilder’s seeming technocracy, there are
threads similar to Roepke’s attacks on mass society and massification. Let us
take a look at a typical Gilder statement:

"Microchip technology is now converging with fiber optics–also essentially
made of silicon–to create a new information economy. In the form of
computers linked with fiber optics–allowing telecommuting, home schools and
remote health care–sand and glass replace oil and coal, hospital beds and
centralized medicine, ineffectively centralized schools and colleges,
environmentally wasteful agriculture and culturally erosive television and
entertainment."

What does all this mean but an attack on the large, bureaucratic administrative
state! Home schooling, home medicine, truly domestic employment,
decentralization of all types. Roepke as well as Gilder would have opposed the
vulgarity and stupefying effects of mass television. When Gilder states that the
"death of television…would be the salvation of American competitiveness,"
Roepke would nod his approval.

Roepke never believed in the inevitability of monopoly or huge economies of
scale. He believed:

"there is a natural gravitation towards competition rather than towards
monopoly, and this gravitation is commonly so strong that very rarely, indeed,
has a monopoly come to life in the absence of more or less violent engineering
on the part of the State…It is doubtful whether there would many monopolies in
the world if the State, in order to offset the natural gravitation toward
competition, had not weighted the scales with its authority, its jurisdiction, and
its general economic policy in the direction of fostering the formation of
monopolies."

He also recognized that his "third way" was firmly based in an appreciation of
the market economy and not some vague repudiation of the market. The market
economy is a neutral philosophic category which is not to be confused with
"capitalism" which is the historical individuality in particular concrete
circumstances which could have been otherwise.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Now that we have arrived at the end of the 20th century, what do we do next? In
the preface to Civitas Humana Wilhelm Roepke refers to the Swiss novel,
Quite Possibly, which served as his statement about the predictions which
could be made following World War II. They could be either gloomily
pessimistic and apocalyptic or cheerily optimistic.

But we are precisely in the same radical uncertainty today as we were then. With
the downfall of the Iron Curtain and the elimination of the Soviet Union, the
predictions of the future are widely variant. Eastern Europe is floundering in its
search for alternatives somewhere between anarcho-capitalism and collectivism.
Russia is slouching toward military despotism, desperately trying to find a
dictator in the Roman sense who will allow a return to normal civil society after
the "emergency" has passed. But the problem for the Russians is that they have
little or no experience of any normal civil society on which to draw. They have
no Cincinnatuses at the plow because they replaced them all with tractors in the
hope of unlimited economies of scale.

We need a Wilhelm Roepke now more than ever. It is still the case that the
gloomy and the cheerful are both "quite possible." What are most needed are
the qualities of courage and intellectual responsibility which Roepke breathed
into his life and writings. Roepke was trying to describe the normal conditions
for a city of man to which one could repair after the abnormalities of the
totalitarian systems had exhausted themselves.

But even though Communism and the Soviet Union have exhausted themselves
that does not mean that totalitarian temptations have gone away. The United
States does not face the immediate problems of the restoration of order by
means of squalid dictatorships and oligarchical juntos as does Russia and
Eastern Europe, but we do face Fascist temptations of our own.

Wilhelm Roepke was always extremely aware of the fact that his concept of the
Third Way could easily be confused with the alleged "middle course" of
Fascism–not as totalitarian as Communism and not as laissez-faire as liberalism.
Yes, Fascism was a hybrid, but according to Roepke the result is:

"interventionism plus collectivist phraseology. To describe more fully the type
of an economic system characterising Fascism, one might say that the middle
course which Fascism is steering between a competitive and a collectivist
economy, leads in practice, to a heavily monopolistic-interventionist society
adorned by terminological and phraseological ornaments, with an extensive
governmental control of prices and capital investments and large `socialisation
of losses,’ whereby the capitalistic institution of bankruptcy is, to some extent,
replaced by concentration camps and Lipari islands."

How contemporary does all that sound? Bailing out of Chrysler, the S&L
crisis,–what are these but the socialisation of losses. Industrial planning,
reinventing government, national health plans with large state cooperatives–what
else is this but "interventionism plus collectivist phraseology?"

The persistent attacks on the competitive economic vitality of the 1980s as the
decade of greed and the comparison with the new mergers of the 1990s as
dictated by planning necessities by well-meaning intellectuals is reminiscent of
the situation during the Great Depression. In his book Crises and Cycles,
Roepke points out:

"…this revival of the medieval principle of numerus clausus is a very
short-sighted interference with the dynamic forces of our economic system
which should be stimulated instead of being strangled. If there are enterprising
persons to-day who have enough optimism and courage to undertake new
investment we have every reason for rejoicing, for that is just is what we need in
the interests of recovery. They should be encouraged instead of being
intimidated, even if they are uncomfortable competitors for the old-established
firms and a danger to vested interests."

America’s flirtations with Fascism will always come dressed in the uniform of
Mussolini rather than Karl Marx. All one has to do is to look at the early New
Deal with its Fascist inspiration to see what a President like Bill Clinton can do
who is inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roepke never fell for the intermediate ground of the Welfare State. He
intransigently opposed the excesses of the Welfare State:

Are we to call it progress if we continuously increase the number of people to
be treated as economic minors and therefore to remain under the tutelage of the
state? Is it not, on the contrary, progress if the broad masses of the people
come of age economically, thanks to their rising incomes, and become
responsible for themselves so that we can cut down the welfare state instead of
inflating it more and more?" The welfare state is "bloated", built on envy, and
"turns the state into an income pump, working day and night, with tubes and
valves, with suction and pressure flows…a pumping engine…with considerable
friction losses.

Whatever humanitarian justification the welfare state had in aiding individuals
during the Industrial Revolution has long ago been swallowed up by envy and
resentment. The destruction of emulation and the rise of envy is partly a
function of the fact that in the twentieth century heros are harder and harder to
come by.

Heros make the man. Man becomes what heros he keeps. I recently gave a talk
on Adam Smith and Constitutional Economics at Hampden-Sydney College and
in preparing my remarks came across a fascinating historical study by Peter
Karsten of the college’s namesakes, the patriot-heroes John Hampden and
Algernon Sydney. He noted:

The decline in importance of Jefferson, Hampden, and Sydney as
patriot-symbols is occurring in both the United States and Great Britain and is
surely symptomatic of a general movement over the past three centuries toward
executive consolidation and use of power and the public’s general acceptance
of that movement.

It was Roepke’s mission to reverse this general movement toward the
administrative state by throwing off the general lethargy and public listlessness
which characterized most of his peers. This means overturning the false
optimism about human nature and human institutions which has pervaded our
political culture since the time of the Progressives.

Our mission if we decide to accept it, is to join Roepke in the movement to
regain our citizenship in the Civitas Humana. We must ever be vigilant to
preserve our liberties and our virtue.

Bibliography

Figgis, John Neville. The Will to Freedom or The Gospel of Nietzsche and The
Gospel of Christ. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1969. Originally
published in 1917.

Gilder, George. "Yale’s Dr. Doom Looks Into the Impoverished Future" Wall
Street Journal, February 25, 1993, p. A12.

Karsten, Peter. Patriot-Heroes In England and America. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Roepke, Wilhelm. Civitas Humana. London: William Hodge and Company,
Ltd., 1948.

Roepke, Wilhelm. Crises and Cycles. London: William Hodge & Company, ltd.
1936.

Roepke, Wilhelm. "Fascist Economics" Economica, February, 1935.

Roepke, Wilhelm. "The Free West," in Freedom and Serfdom ed. Albert
Hunold. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1961.

Roepke, Wilhelm. The Humane Economy. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company,
1960.

Roepke, Wilhelm. International Economic Disintegration (London: William
Hodge & Company Limited, 1950.

Roepke, Wilhelm. The Problem of Economic Order. Cairo: National Bank of
Egypt, 1951.

Roepke, Wilhelm. The Solution of the German Problem. New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1946.

Euripides, The Trojan Women in The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. III, ed.
David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1959.

Wilhelm Roepke, "The Free West," in Freedom and Serfdom, ed. Albert
Hunold, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1961.

Wilhelm Roepke, The Social Crisis of Our Time, ed. William F. Campbell and
foreword by Russell Kirk, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1992.