The Journey Home-Wilhelm Röpke & the Humane Economy

Wilhelm Röpke

by Roger Scruton


The following comments were originally given as a lecture on April 12 at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s 2008 National Leadership Conference held in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Two Greek words define my topic: nostos and oikos. The first—from which we have ‘nostalgia’—denotes return to the home, and it is the great theme of Homer’s Odyssey. The second—from which we have ‘economy’—denotes the home itself, conceived as a place of settlement, to be defended against marauders and also opened to friends and guests. The most basic social needs and sentiments are summoned by these words, and if we are now living in conditions of hyper-mobility, in which no one is settled deeply enough or for long enough to enjoy the sense of home, then it is not surprising that we are also living in a condition of intense nostalgia. We are constantly seeking for the place of rest, the refuge from change and stress and fleetingness, the condition in which we will be ‘restored to ourselves.’ Some seek this place in the past, believing that we must return to a simpler and more tranquil way of doing things. Others seek it in the future, believing that the stress of competition and mobility is something to be ‘overcome.’ Few if any find the place of refuge in the present.

When Wilhelm Röpke set out to write his defence of the ‘humane economy’ he had fallen under the spell of the Austrian school—of Mises and Hayek especially—whose defence of the market against state planning and socialist distribution had taken on a new credibility in the light of the tyranny and economic disorder of the Bolshevik experiment. At the same time Röpke was aware that markets are not enough. They do not guarantee the goal of economic activity, which is the oikos, the place of settlement and security where people are at home with each other and at peace with their neighbours. The market mechanism may not be sufficient for social order, but it is necessary, for all the reasons spelled out by the Austrians. Only in a market economy can prices serve as a guide to the scarcity of goods, or wages a guide to the supply of labour. Only in a market economy can individuals plan their own budgets and make rational choices for the deployment of their assets, their labour and their bargaining skills. The argument developed by Mises in his critique of socialism was, Röpke thought, demonstrative. The centrally planned economy destroyed the information on which rational economic decisions depend. This information is available in the form of prices and contracts in a free economy; but it is irretrievably dispersed by the attempt to dictate all economic factors from on high.

I don’t think that anyone who has followed the careful arguments of Mises and Hayek would doubt the point. Nor was it a point that Röpke wished to labour. Röpke’s interest was in the oikos, which he believed to be threatened from above by the state—something that he had seen at first hand with his experiences of the Nazis—and also threatened from below, by the anarchy of unbridled self-interest.

It is fairly normal, nowadays, for left-liberal thinkers to pay lip-service to the Hayekian theory of the market. Yes, they will say; the market is necessary as a transmitter of economic signals. And yes, without markets economies have no ready way to regain equilibrium in the wake of a disturbance. But markets have no respect for social order; they neither generate nor perpetuate the sense of community on which we all depend. They depend upon and encourage both self-interest and competition, and regard nothing as sacred, nothing as beyond the reach of buying and selling. Is it surprising, therefore, if capitalist societies today are witnessing social breakdown on a hitherto unimaginable scale, as the pursuit of self-interest drives all concern for the community from the thoughts and emotions of consumers? Isn’t the ‘consumer society’ precisely what we must expect, from a philosophy which makes ‘consumer sovereignty’ into the first principle of economic life?

Röpke would have endorsed some of that. But he was determined not to draw the conclusion that left-liberal thinkers draw, namely that we need to control the market through the state. Powers exercised by the state, he believed, inevitably end up in the hands of unanswerable bureaucrats, and can also never be recaptured by society, whatever the extent of their abuse. If the market needs to be constrained for the common good, then the constraint must come from below, not from above. It must be a social constraint, rather than a political constraint. And thus was born the idea of a ‘social market’ economy—an idea which was to influence German ministers of finance throughout the period of reconstruction following the end of the Second World War. Röpke, who had fled from Nazi Germany to Switzerland, believed that he had found a model for the social market, in the Swiss forms of local democracy. He was also (although of Protestant background) strongly influenced by the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, and in particular by the doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’ expounded in the encyclicalQuadragesimo anno, which Pope Pius XI issued in 1931. Pius intended this as a description of the Church’s own organisation, through the episcopate, according to which decisions are always taken at the ‘subsidiary’ level—the lowest level compatible with unified government. But he also implied that economic and political life might be similarly organized, so that power was always passed up from the bottom and never imposed from above.

All that might seem like a call for the empowerment of civil society rather than the state, and so it was interpreted by Röpke, who took it as foundational for his doctrine of ‘decentrism.’ However, it should be noted thatQuadragesimo anno marked the first intrusion of genuinely socialist ideas into the teachings of the Church. Economic freedom, the encyclical argued, does not lead of its own accord to the common good, but stands in need of a ‘true and effective directing principle,’ and that principle is ‘social justice.’ Behind that phrase there lurks the whole egalitarian agenda which, in search of an ‘equality of condition,’ looks eventually to the state to impose it. Interestingly enough the first draft of the encyclical was composed by Oswald von Nell-Breuning SJ, professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School in Frankfurt, and a thinker deeply influenced by Marx’s theory of exploitation. And in due course the term ‘subsidiarity’ was to enjoy a second life through the European Union, whose official documents declare that all decisions must be taken at the subsidiary level, while reserving to the unelected and largely unaccountable European Commission the privilege of deciding what level that might be.

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T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor

by Roger Scruton

T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He was also the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic since Samuel Johnson, and the most influential religious thinker in the Anglican tradition since the Wesleyan movement. His social and political vision is contained in all his writings, and has been absorbed and reabsorbed by generations of English and American readers, upon whom it exerts an almost mystical fascination—even when they are moved, as many are, to reject it. Without Eliot, the philosophy of Toryism would have lost all substance during the last century. And while not explicitly intending it, Eliot set this philosophy on a higher plane, intellectually, spiritually, and stylistically, than has ever been reached by the adherents of the socialist idea.

Eliot attempted to shape a philosophy for our times that would be richer and more true to the complexity of human needs than the free-market panaceas that have so often dominated the thinking of conservatives in government. He assigned a central place in his social thinking to high culture. He was a thorough traditionalist in his beliefs but an adventurous modernist in his art, holding artistic modernism and social traditionalism to be different facets of a common enterprise. Modernism in art was, for Eliot, an attempt to salvage and fortify a living artistic tradition in the face of the corruption and decay of popular culture.

ELIOT WAS born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888, and educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, whose Hegelian vision of society exerted a profound influence over him. He came, as did so many educated Americans of his generation, from a profoundly religious and public-spirited background, although his early poems suggest a bleak and despairing agnosticism, which he only gradually and painfully overcame. In 1914 he met Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to settle in England. He married during the following year, which also saw the publication of his first successful poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This work, together with the other short poems that were published along with it as Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917, profoundly altered the course of English literature. They were the first truly modernist works in English, although the most visible influences on their imagery and diction were not English but French—specifically, the fin-de-siècle irony of Laforgue, and the symbolism of Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Verlaine. They were also social poems, concerned to express a prevailing collective mood, even when dressed in the words of a specific protagonist. The wartime generation found themselves in these poems, in a way that they had not found themselves in the pseudo-romantic literature of the Edwardian period.

Shortly afterwards Eliot published a book of essays, The Sacred Wood, which was to be as influential as the early poetry. In these essays, Eliot presented his new and exacting theory of the role of criticism, of the necessity for criticism if our literary culture is to survive. For Eliot, it is no accident that criticism and poetry so often come together in the same intelligence—as in his own case, and the case of Coleridge, whom he singled out as the finest of English critics. For the critic, like the poet, is concerned to develop the "sensibility" of his reader—by which term Eliot meant a kind of intelligent observation of the human world. Critics do not abstract or generalize: they look, and record what they see. But in doing so, they also convey a sense of what matters in human experience, distinguishing the false from the genuine emotion. While Eliot was to spell out only gradually and obscurely over many years just what he meant by "sensibility," his elevated conception of the critic’s role struck a chord in many of his readers. Furthermore, The Sacred Wood contained essays that were to revolutionize literary taste. The authoritative tone of these essays gave rise to the impression that the modern world was at last making itself heard in literature—and that its voice was T. S. Eliot’s.

THE SACRED Wood turned the attention of the literary world to the "metaphysical poets" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to the Elizabethan dramatists—the lesser predecessors and the heirs of Shakespeare, whose raw language, rich with the sensation of the thing described, provided a telling contrast to the sentimental sweetness that Eliot condemned in his immediate contemporaries. There is also an essay on Dante, discussing a question that was frequently to trouble Eliot—that of the relationship between poetry and belief. To what extent could one appreciate the poetry of the Divine Comedy while rejecting the doctrine that had inspired it? This question was a real one for Eliot, for several reasons.

Eliot was—like his fellow modernists and contemporaries, Ezra Pound and James Joyce—profoundly influenced by Dante, whose limpid verse-form, colloquial style, and solemn philosophy created a vision of the ideal in poetry. At the same time, he rejected the theological vision of the Divine Comedy—rejected it with a deep sense of loss. Yet in his own poetry the voice of Dante would constantly return, offering him turns of phrase, lightning flashes of thought, and—most of all—a vision of the modern world from a point of view outside it, a point of view irradiated by an experience of holiness (albeit an experience that he did not then share). And when Eliot did finally come to share in this vision, he wrote, in the last of the Four Quartets, the most brilliant of all imitations of Dante in English—an imitation which is something far finer than an imitation, in which the religious vision of Dante is transported and translated into the world of modern England.