This is the second essay in a symposium that reconsiders neglected conservative thinkers. The essays were originally presented at the 2026 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. The next entry, on Frank Meyer, will be published tomorrow, August 26. You can read about Robert Nisbet here.

　　In his A Program for Conservatives, Russell Kirk once recounted the story of a gentleman who once did him the honor of observing that he espoused conservatism “with the vehemence of a radical”—a charge he could not deny. Neither could German economist Wilhelm Roepke. As with Russell Kirk, though, more than radical vehemence was involved.Roepke’s views were based on principles which gave him insight against the misleading policies and ideologies of his day, courage to those who listened to his advice, and displeasure to those whom he made his enemies: the Nazis, the communists, and the Keynesians—all in the difficult war and post-war periods.

　　In late 1944, for example, the Nazis took over the Hungarian government. They announced: “The time of Roepkeism is now over.” After the war, in East Germany, the communist government listed Roepke as one of the enemies of the state. His bourgeois theories were “dangerous.” Totalitarians completely rejected the economist’s point-of-view.

　　In West Germany, though, Ludwig Erhard, Minister of Economics in the Adenauer administration and later chancellor, told of having read Roepke’s works during the war. The contents he “devoured like the desert the life-giving water.” Roepke’s voice was critical in persuading the West German government to throw out Keynesian policies. So started what came to be called the “German economic miracle.”

　　Roepke was born near Hanover, Germany, in 1899. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1966. After serving in World War I, he attended the University of Marburg and graduated in 1921, and later became one of the youngest professors in Germany; he served on the Brauns Commission of the Brüning administration to propose policies to deal with the growing unemployment crisis during the early days of the Great Depression. He actively opposed the National Socialists, and when Hitler was inaugurated as chancellor in January 1933, he left Germany, heading first for the Netherlands, and then finally to the University of Istanbul. In 1937, he was invited to teach at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. During the course of his professional life, he published more than 800 books and articles, many of which were translated into foreign languages, extending his influence from Europe into Egypt, Japan, South America, and the United States.

　　In the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns, an unemployed character, Murray, tells his nephew, Nick, while standing on the deserted corner in downtown New York City, that in ten minutes he would see something terrible happen: people going to work! The screen is immediately flooded with pedestrians, honking cars, buses, and trucks, and flashing traffic lights. The picture is one of a repulsive crowd of people compelled to endure a dehumanized way of living—in order to make a living. That bothered Roepke.

　　Roepke had a willingness—some would say radical willingness—to deal with the question of social power.

　　Roepke described the crisis of modern man as one of “spiritual collectivization.” This included a number of components such as proletarianization, the misuse of machine technology, urban crowding, a crisis of democracy, the arrogance of vested interests, a general leveling down, and a concentration of property. With industrialization came the depopulation of the country and farming communities and the corresponding growth of large urban centers. And the family faced disintegration in an environment that separated its members from each other and from the land and small towns which in the past had nourished the human spirit and left the economy with less flexibility and stability. Likewise, industries became highly concentrated, leaving workers with little or no productive property of their own. Machine technology provided jobs, but they were usually boring and sometimes dangerous or unhealthy.

　　What did Roepke recommend we should do about these problems? Before answering that question, it’s important to grasp his understanding of the kinds of policy tools he believed could be used to treat them. There is a misconception, he believed, not only of the significance of intermediary social structures, but also of basic categories, including the neglect of intermediary forms of economic policy.In The Social Crisis of Our Time, he explained that viewing economic positions as if they were on a straight line, going from laissez-faire to collectivism, was misleading.“Any increase in intervention,” he wrote, “appears … as a gradual concession: seen from the laissez-faire end it is a betrayal, viewed from the other end it is a half-measure.”

　　So, an “intermediary” economic policy did not mean a compromise between classical liberalism (a free market economy) and collectivism, but faithfulness to a separate set of principles. In his words: “While we repudiate the former as well as the latter, it is nevertheless clear that in this intermediate sphere—of interventionism or statism—there must be a dividing line separating legitimate from illegitimate interventions, final boundaries to overstep which would in the end lead to collectivism.”

　　Here we have that which distinguishes Roepke from the laissez-faireist as well as the communist. And it explains why he has been so neglected in conservative thought. He simply did not fit into the accepted categories of the Cold War era.

　　This problem still lingers with us today.From one angle, his thinking appears to be eclectic, as though he were fusing liberal economic free market thinking with old-fashioned conservative values. But that is not the best way to understand him. For Roepke, there is an underlying harmony of the economic and social spheres, and it is incumbent on the policy analyst to grasp that unity and apply the relevant principles. Balance and equilibrium are achieved when the policies are rooted in the insights of Western Christian civilization, especially understanding human nature in the robust sense, not trying to find the eutectic point where opposing elements melt together.

　　Following through on this line of reasoning, Roepke offers his principle of compatible instead of incompatible economic policy. The former is in harmony with an economic structure based on the market; incompatible ones are not. We may follow his example in comparing a tariff with a quota. A tariff is a price, a tax, which burdens other prices and raises costs, but still it is assimilated in trade the same way other cost increases are. It does not interfere with the regulative influence of the price mechanism. But the regulation of foreign trade by quotas means that the government suspends the automatic regulation of the market and must replace it with definite government control. The incompatible policy creates a situation requiring interventions to clean up the spillover effects of the initial intervention, or as Roepke put it, “an unending dynamic chain of cause and effect and everything begins to go downhill.”

　　With this major conceptual distinction, Roepke was able to maneuver more freely among policy options to address the many forms the social crisis of our time takes. The result of that maneuvering is an alternative he himself described as the “third way,” neither capitalistic nor collectivistic. “The new path,” he wrote, “is precisely the one that will lead us out of the dilemma of ‘capitalism’ and collectivism. It consists of the economic humanism of the ‘Third Way.’” He always kept the α of anthropology in his thinking.

　　Among the primary building blocks of the economic humanism Roepke advocated is the preservation of a healthy farming sector.But when he referred to this sector, he was not especially concerned about food production as such, but about a particular form of production.In European parlance, it was called “peasant” agriculture.In American parlance, it is better to call it “family farming.”The family farm has many sociological benefits, not least of which is the fact that it is “the last mighty refuge in the face of the collectivization, mechanization and urbanization of our time.”

　　Among other points, Roepke emphasized that the peasant farm (family farm) has a size which is suitable for the work of one family; the mode of life embodies “tradition and the succession of generations”; it is set in a neighborly community “to which every thought of competition is alien”; it follows the cycle of nature and its laws and includes cattle raising and tillage in various combinations; it brings men and nature together; it provides “satisfying and purposeful activity” and “promotes in an ideal manner the independent development of personality and at the same time the warmth of human fellowship.” He offered much more analysis, of course, but this is enough to suggest to the reader the kind of thinking his “third way” entails.

　　Roepke’s vision is a measure of what we have lost, but, if there is any basis for hope, it is also a guide about how to get back to the humane life the West once knew.

　　Roepke did not mean, however, to neglect industry and trade. He was in favor of rehabilitating policy around small- and medium-sized businesses and opposing the bias which favored large-scale industry. In his view it had “become apparent that the small enterprises can hold their own far better in the face of big business than had been believed in the initial period of intoxication with industrial expansion … [with] the complexity of requirements and the increasing importance of personal services … the number of small independent enterprises has not decreased, but increased.”

　　Furthermore, new technology of that time supported smaller-scale producers such as electric motors, the combustion engine, and improvements in machine tools. Today, we could add the use of computers, solar power, and related improvements to update the list. Of course, an evaluation of “artificial intelligence” and related devices is a whole other category which has to be evaluated in terms of its own multiplicitous, anthropological effects.

　　Perhaps more importantly, and more divisively, is Roepke’s willingness—some would say radical willingness—to deal with the question of social power. Against the prejudices favoring concentrated, large industries, Roepke wrote, “All this will have to be completely changed and the progressive revaluation which will entail an outward redistribution of social power will become the very index of the recovery of our society.” Small enterprises would entail a wide distribution of economic, political, and social power and enhance thereby stability and liberty. But that index would also include the wide distribution of home ownership. Elsewhere he wrote that “decentralization of habitat by means of ownership of house and garden implies that new conditions must be created in which a genuine and natural family life can thrive.”

　　From here Roepke criticizes the modern megalopolis as a “monstrous abnormality” and a form of “pathological degeneracy,” not at all what a town as a center of cultural, economic, social, and political life should be: Florence, Geneva, and Weimar were hamlets by today’s standard but were far superior where it counts. A measure of town and country planning is therefore needed to create the necessary conditions.

　　All of these considerations can also be viewed in the light of the American sense of ordered liberty. Ours is a heritage of liberty through specific institutions, which are the concrete manifestations of, as well as the constitutive means of liberty. Much of what Roepke promotes involves non-political forms of social organization, at least not mainly involving the national government, if at all: the family, the garden, private property, the church, the importance of the role of morals and basic values in life. Public policy is to foster and protect these intermediate structures and basic beliefs.

　　Finally, Roepke’s vision not only presupposes traditional Christian moral values, but also civilized behavior, of courtesy, politeness, and cordiality. He would be horrified at today’s barbarity not only on the Internet, but in business and government and even in churches. The whole tone of American and European society suffers from a pathological degeneration here, too. And with that, ordered liberty, which depends on these other structures and behaviors, also decays. His vision is a measure of what we have lost, but, if there is any basis for hope, it is also a guide about how to get back to the humane life the West once knew.