Wilhelm Röpke was Professor of Economics, first in Jena, then in Graz, Marburg, Istanbul, and finally Geneva, Switzerland, and one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy, theorising and collaborating to organise the post-World War II economic re-awakening of the war-wrecked German economy, deploying a program sometimes referred to as the sociological neoliberalism.
Background
Röpke was born October 10, 1899 in Hanover, Germany. He grew up in a rural community of independent farmers and cottage industry craftsmen. His father was a country doctor. That upbringing can be seen in his later belief that a healthy, balanced, small community is most fit for human life.
The event, however, that shaped his chosen purpose in life was his experience in the German army in the First World War. War was “the expression of a brutal and stupid national pride that fostered the craving for domination and set its approval on collective immorality,” Röpke explained. The experience of war made him decide to become an economist and a sociologist when the cannons fell silent.
Education
Röpke studied in the universities of Göttingen, Tübingen and Marburg. At the University of Marburg he studied economics, receiving the PhD in 1921 and the Habilitation in 1922.
At first, Röpke thought that socialism was the answer to the world’s problems. But he soon discovered that the only realistic solutions were to be found in classical liberalism and the market economy. Among the most important influences in that discovery were the writings of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. “It was his book, Nation, State and Economy (1919) which was in many ways the redeeming answer to the questions tormenting a young man who had just come back from the trenches,” Röpke wrote. And it was Mises who “rendered me immune, at a very early date, against the virus of socialism with which most of us came back from the First World War.”
Career
In 1922, Röpke became an adviser to the German government on the problems of reparation payments resulting from the Treaty of Versailles. From 1924 to 1928 he was a professor at the University of Jena, spending part of the time, in 1927–1928, in the United States studying American agrarian problems under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. After returning to Europe he was a professor of economics at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1928–1929. In 1929 he was appointed professor of economics at the University of Marburg, a position he held until his expulsion by the Nazi regime in 1933. He also served as a member of the German National Commission on Unemployment in 1930 and 1931, and as an adviser to the German government in 1932.
After leaving Germany in 1933 he accepted a position at the University of Istanbul, Turkey, which he held until 1937, and during which he undertook the reorganization of its department of economics. He also founded and was the first director of the Turkish Institute of the Social Sciences.
In 1937 he was invited to become a professor of international economic relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, a position he retained until his untimely death on February 12, 1966.
After the German occupation of France, Röpke was three times offered a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York (in 1940, 1941, and 1943) as a means of escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. But each time he turned down the invitation to leave neutral Switzerland, having decided to continue to be a voice for freedom and reason in a totalitarian-dominated Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Röpke circulated a memorandum offering a “plan for an international periodical” that would be devoted to the restatement and defense of classical liberalism and the free-market economy against all forms of political and economic collectivism. The journal was never established, but the ideas conveyed in the memorandum served as support for F. A. Hayek’s successful founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, an international association of scholars and opinion makers dedicated to the philosophy of freedom. Röpke served as the society’s president from 1960 to 1962.
In the 1950s, he was an economic adviser to the government of West Germany. He also was one of the leading figures of a group of market-oriented German economists who in the postwar period became known as the ordo-liberals; their purpose and goal was the construction of a “social market economy” that assured both an open, competitive order and minimal social guarantees.
Politics
Röpke was against the Nazi Regime during 1930-40s.