WILHELM RÖPKE
Swiss Localist, Global Economist
By John Zmirak
List Item No. 300
ISBN: 1-882926-56-0 (cloth)
241 pages (includes Index)
List Price: $24.95
Internet Special: $21.21 —
[ Review & Change Shopping Cart Contents ] [ Secure Checkout ]
List Item No. 300a
ISBN: 1-882926-67-7 (paper)
241 pages (includes Index)
List Price: $14.95
Internet Special: $12.71 —
[ Review & Change Shopping Cart Contents ] [ Secure Checkout ]
John Zmirak's introduction to the life and work of Wilhelm Röpke, written with the touch of an accomplished writer and journalist, weaves an analysis of Röpke's economic and social philosophy around the story of the momentous events in which Röpke took part and helped shape. Forced from his German academic post by the Nazis in 1933, Röpke eventually landed in Geneva, where he became a fierce foe of Hitler's regime. Drawing on his understanding and appreciation of the Swiss traditions of decentralized government, widespread property ownership, mediating institutions, bourgeois virtues and self-sufficiency, religious tolerance, and constitutional democracy, Röpke formulated a social critique that constituted a fundamental challenge to the Nazis' legitimacy.
He also forged a unique economics. Realizing that the debased and corrupt capitalist order that predated the war had little to recommend it, Röpke refused to shill for corporations or the fabulously wealthy. He instead put forth a free-market economic theory that simultaneously recognized the force of socialist and traditionalist objections to capitalism. Röpke's "Third Way" provided a way to make principled distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate government interventions in the marketplace and became the basis of the Christian Democratic political movement.
After the war, Röpke and his economic ideas played a leading role in facilitating the rapid reconstruction of the German economy, often referred to as the German economic miracle. One of his most famous followers was Ludwig Erhard, chancellor of West Germany from 1963 to 1966, who later praised Röpke for providing "to those trapped in socialist-collectivist thought…words of transformation, offering them once more firm ground under their feet and an inner faith in the value and blessings of freedom, justice, and morality." By the end of his lifetime, Röpke had become a celebrity in his adopted Swiss homeland and a major figure within the American conservative intellectual revival.
With the growing concern, across the political spectrum, with the corrosive effects of nationalism and unrestricted globalization, Röpke's economically informed localism has emerged again as a potent political position. This volume, the third in ISI Books' Library of Modern Thinkers series, will be valuable to anyone interested in the development of a humane economics and just social order.
What They're Saying...
"John Zmirak's book chronicles the intellectual development of Röpke, who started out as an Enlightenment liberal who believed in social progress and ended up a critic of the damage wrought by the excesses of modernization."
—Chronicles
"This is a fine introduction to Wilhelm Röpke's work"
—Choice
"This work offers a sensitive and nuanced account of another free-market hero, one who stressed the importance of the social and moral principles that provide the underpinning without which economic freedom and long-term prosperity cannot survive."
—National Review
"If any person in our contemporary world is entitled to a hearing it is Wilhelm Röpke."
— The New York Times
"John Zmirak provides a fresh and fair look at Wilhelm Röpke. He unearths writings that are sometimes ignored, particularly those relating to international economics, to show that Röpke's "Third Way" compromises neither freedom nor the moral sense. What emerges is a brilliant and complex thinker: a cosmopolitan liberal in the classical tradition who believed firmly in the free economy, sound money, local rights, and the old bourgeois virtues. This book should immediately become the standard treatment of this much-neglected and often-misrepresented figure in the history of ideas."
— Jeffrey Tucker, Vice President, The Mises Institute
READ MORE REVIEWS...
Topics Include:
- A Renaissance Man
- A Career Suicide
- Up From Socialism
- The Fascist Moment
- The Heart of the Heresies
- A Dim Enlightenment
- The Tyrant and the Mob
- An Ethical Anorexia
- Freedom and Domination
- A Solution to the German Question
- Inventing Christian Democracy
- Internationalism and Free Trade
|
News & Notes |
Browse Our Shelves |
Meet Our Authors |
Journals |
About ISI Books |
| Ordering Information |
Join Our Mailing List |
HOME |
ISI BOOKS © 2001
