Apostle of a Humane Economy
Remembering Wilhelm Roepke (1899 -1966)
by
Patrick M. Boarman
Wilhelm Roepke entered my life, with immense effect on me, more than 50 years ago. That was a time in which the political and intellectual climate was rather different from today. The world was just beginning to rise from the ashes of the greatest war, World War II. Socialism was everywhere in the ascendant. The Soviet colossus bestrode half the planet. China was soon to become a monolithic Communist state. And the United States stood virtually alone, if we except Switzerland, as guardian of the market economy. Who could then have foreseen that in 1998 the Soviet empire would be no more, that a united Germany would have arisen like a phoenix to become the economic powerhouse of Europe, that "socialism" and "planned economy" would become derisory, even pejorative terms (except maybe in Cuba), and that expressions such as "social market economy," "third way," and "a humane economy" would become the fashionable slogans of the moment? 1
1. Revelation in Geneva
But that is today, and to understand today we need to go back to yesterday, quite a few yesterdays in fact. It was exactly 52 years ago, in this very month of October, 1946, that I first encountered Wilhelm Roepke. The setting of that encounter has remained with me: a crisp Fall day, in a handsome chateau housing the Graduate Institute of International Studies, on the shores of Lake Geneva; and, in the distance, across the Lake, the majestic white cone of Mont Blanc, faintly visible through the morning haze.
In the classroom, a group of some 30 students waited expectantly. As I recall, they included a half dozen young ladies from Smith College, all lined up in the front row and all but one, remarkably, writing, as do I, with the left hand, a circumstance that confounded the non-Americans in the room. Even in free Switzerland, I discovered, left-handedness is regarded as an affliction, best extirpated in a child's earliest years. "Do you mean that in America they actually let you write the wrong way when you were a child?" was the inveterate refrain that was heard. But if my handedness was left and genetic, my ideological sympathies were moderately rightward and self-chosen. I was ready for Roepke of whom it was bruited about, "He is the most conservative member of the faculty!" On the other hand, Roepke's name, other than his general political orientation, meant little to me-his major works were not yet available in English. Also, economics was not yet my discipline. I had come to Geneva fresh from Columbia University where I had received a master's degree from the School of Journalism. My prior academic work was at a Jesuit university in languages, the arts, history, and philosophy. Economics and business were subjects of which I knew little, and that little I didn't really care for very much. But here I was, anyhow, pursuing a degree in political science and in Roepke's classroom at the suggestion of a friend, i.e., more or less by accident
As I think back on that first encounter, on what became for me a life-altering event, I was prepared to be informed, possibly entertained, perhaps bored. I was not prepared to be put under a spell as was the case when Roepke strode into the classroom: a man in his middle forties, of medium height and build, with a handsome leonine head and sandy hair, ruddy complexion, blue eyes that burned with some inner fire, but free of any hint of fanaticism, a voice of heavy timbre and somewhat louder than normal due to a chronic condition of deafness, and finally, Roepke's signature trait, craggy brows shading the intent eyes. His lecture was in English which he used with sensitivity and precision. His text was rich with literary and historical allusion: a verse from Goethe, a maxim from Montaigne, a quip from Shakespeare, or apt quotations from de Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Constant or Adam Smith. Even after all these years, I feel still the intensity and the power of his thought and of his presentation which combined passion with a wit that was sometime playful, sometimes mordant, never wounding of another person, but always precisely on point. The finely honed humor was infectious, keeping his hearer's lips slightly curled in anticipatory merriment.
Particularly amusing was the manner in which Roepke employed his hearing handicap to manage the discussion. In those years, his seminars, conducted around a long table, occasionally drew a couple of socialists who came not so much to learn as to heckle him. For the most part these nay-sayers were silenced by rapier thrusts of Roepkean wit which, though gracefully delivered and shedding little or no blood, left the antagonists squirming and red-faced. Rarely did things turn obnoxious, but when they did, Roepke resorted to his secret weapon-a volume control on his hearing aid concealed on his belt. When the hostile voices reached a certain level of stridency, a slight movement of Roepke's left shoulder indicated to me that he was tuning them out and that it was time for me to raise my hand to pose a question. "Yes, Mr. Boarman," he would say brightly, the slight movement of his shoulder indicating that he was now turning the volume control back up. Notwithstanding such occasional divertissements, learning from Roepke in the seminar format was like taking part in a totally absorbing interactive mystery play, with us students hanging on every word.
2. Roepke at Home
In short, in those lectures and seminars long ago, Wilhelm Roepke snared my soul, so to speak. I determined then and there to change my focus and to become an economist. Though Roepke was probably the most distinguished professor at the University of Geneva at that time, he was always accessible, or at least I found him so. In those first years after the War, automobiles were rarities in Geneva. Bicycles filled the streets and often Roepke and I would ride our bikes home together from the Institute. I was a frequent visitor to his home, then and some years later when, as a married man with three children (and, of course, a wife), I returned to Geneva to finish my doctoral dissertation. Evenings at the Roepkes, where his wife, Eva, presided as hostess and which might include prominent personages temporarily in the City-a Ludwig Erhard, a Friedrich Hayek, a Walter Eucken-were a genuine delight.
At these evening gatherings, Roepke showed himself to be a gifted raconteur who could appreciate and tell a good joke. Pompous personages, academic and other, were nicely deflated with barbed, but good-humored comment as the wine flowed, after which the talk turned solemn and sometimes portentous. To this young and impressionable would-be economist, participating in a Roepke soirée was, in the language that my children now use, a totally awesome experience.
Roepke's scholarly output was even then phenomenal but given the academic demands a graduate student was under, it was possible only to sample only a few of his books. There was one in which I, as a neophyte economist, was particularly interested, his basic economics textbook, not yet translated into English. Great was my rejoicing when I found in the Institute's library a French version of that book, Explication Economique du Monde Moderne. I read it virtually at one sitting, finding it to be not only a splendid layman's introduction to the arcane science of economics but an eloquent anti-totalitarian tract as well. I determined then and there to translate the book into English, an ambition which was eventually realized.
3. The "Third Road"
There was another reason for my gratification at having come upon this book. The reading of it was a liberating experience. For it showed a way around or through the frozen dialogue between the adherents of old-style capitalism on the one hand and of a government-run economy on the other, to which much of the discourse among academic economists of that time seemed to reduce. In this textbook Roepke argued for the rejection of socialism and the reconstitution of the market economy as the only economic system compatible with human freedom. The market economy for which he pleaded, however, differed fundamentally from the system which, under the vague and emotion-charged label of "capitalism," had persisted in Europe until the 1930s and then perished of its own degeneracies. Capitalism for Roepke was a highly imprecise noun, freighted with the ideological ballast of the nineteenth century which gave birth to the term, and even today carrying the value tags, positive or negative, of whomever happens to be defining it. In contrast, the market economy, at its core and unencumbered with labels from the right or the left, was for him a term embracing those universal human behaviors associated with acquiring and using economic resources and famously codified in the laws of supply and demand. Indiscriminate mixing of the concept of a market economy with "capitalism" results in the attribution of qualities to the market mechanism that properly are only ascribable to some specific capitalist societies of the past, notably those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, the market economy that was installed in West Germany after World War II-and which the Germans chose to call a "social market economy"-represented a deliberate attempt to divorce the market idea from historical capitalism. The lasting achievement of Roepke's friend, Ludwig Erhard, was his abstraction of the powerful concept of the market from the institutional matrix of nineteenth century capitalism in which it was embedded and his demonstration that the market can yield a quite different result within a different institutional framework.
The social market economy itself, in turn, echoed one of Roepke's conceptions of a much earlier date, that of the "third road." In his numerous elaborations of this idea, he showed how the old antitheses of laissez-faire and planned economy could be transcended in a new synthesis of the "third road," later rebaptized as a "humane economy." In such an economy, the laws of supply and demand, while allowed full play to maximize the wealth of the nation, were yet constrained within a framework of (market-conforming) rules including, importantly, those intended to preserve competition. The concept envisaged, as well, the continuous influencing of economic behavior by extra-economic institutions rooted in moral and spiritual values (law, tradition, religion, etc.). For in the absence of such rules and institutions, the benevolent social outcomes of the pursuit by each individual of his self-interest, posited by the classical economists, are extinguished; the market becomes an arena for a dog-eat-dog struggle. It is a thesis for which Russia today furnishes the unhappy proof
It is striking that for all the many years that the concept of the "third road" or the "third way" has been imprinting itself on policy, especially in Germany, but in other places in Europe as well, thanks to Roepke-we are just now hearing about it in this country in the most influential circles. In The New Yorker of July 6 of this year, we are told that Larry Summers, Clinton's potent Deputy Treasury Secretary is "the leading intellectual exponent of the 'third way,' a nascent, and occasionally derided political philosophy associated with the names of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair [its central notion being] how to reconcile the free market with a social conscience."
Even the First Lady has been reported by The New York Times as being engaged with scholars and bankers in "mapping a 'third way' between laissez-faire capitalism and the welfare state." Amazingly, we are told in this same report that Mr. Clinton "was the man who could break the ideological deadlock of left and right, for no one," we are breathlessly informed, "had yet coined the phrase 'third way'… "! Some suspected that the "third way" in which the President was more urgently interested was the one that might offer safe passage between dishonorable impeachment on the one hand and a disgraceful resignation on the other. One can only imagine Wilhelm Roepke's consternation at all this, were he to know of it-and perhaps he does.
One may ask: what has this third way to do with, for example, the famed "middle way" of Sweden? Virtually nothing. Thus, Sweden's overall public spending today is 63% of gross national product, compared to about 36% for the U.S. and 46% for Germany. The Swedish government spends 46% of Sweden's GNP on welfare alone, more than any other country, and the income taxes required to support this gargantuan public generosity take 59% of the pay of people earning as little as $30,000 a year. This is a middle way, or a third way if you wish, which has led Sweden into a swamp of rising unemployment, social spending on a megalomanical scale, and precipitate falls in its competitiveness and standard of living. In the OECD's current review of its members' economic performance, Sweden fell from 4th to 15th place in per capita income.
All of this, of course, has nothing to do with Roepke's third way. Indeed, he was a fierce opponent of the welfare state in the form it had taken in his last years (the mid-1960s) precisely in such places as Sweden and in Great Britain, the United States, and especially in his native Germany. The quest for security through "welfarism" and through a continuous expansion of the public sector in which the state is looked upon as a kind of "fourth dimension" able to satisfy the demands of any class for help, Roepke held to be an illusion.
But again, in keeping with his commitment to "Mass und Mitte," to the avoidance of extremes, Roepke wrote censoriously of the delusions of an unrestrained capitalism, of an obsessive "economism" in which human society was led ineluctably towards a soulless mechanization and standardization and he pleaded incessantly for the adoption of measures aimed at reducing the crowdedness and hothouse atmosphere of modern life. In this context, he was a strong proponent of population controls, of decentralization of industry, and of the securing of the remnants of a rural way of life against urban erosion.
In particular, Roepke saw the unrestrained growth of population as helping to spawn the psychic and spiritual toxins afflicting the contemporary culture. He conceded that the power of modern technology has enabled living standards to increase along with growth of population. But he argued that living standards in the broadest sense, including many non-material dimensions of the good life, would have risen even faster if population growth had slowed. And he posed the plaintive question: "Why is it necessary that every enlargement of economic room which is achieved by the labors and the ingenuity of the existing population, be immediately filled by millions of new individuals instead of serving to increase the well-being of those now on earth?" In this sense, Roepke was an environmentalist before the term had been invented. In today's lexicon he would appear as a slow growther. For him it was not a matter of turning back the clock-a fatuous romanticism which he repudiated-but of refusing to continue heedlessly along the path that had brought us to our present vexations.
4. Adieu
Thus the years passed, in the course of which my relationship with Roepke deepened. We communicated often and at length about the issues that tormented the world of the 1960s: the welfare state and its handmaiden, inflation, and their attendant miseries; the pursuit of what he saw as a baleful new bureaucratic order in Europe under the rubric of a "Common Market"; the enduring power of the Communist myth and the danger of an open conflict with the Soviet Union. In the United States, he appeared with some frequency, in my and others' translations, in The Wall Street Journal, Modern Age, Social Order, National Review, and other newspapers and journals, with essays and books all the while continuing to stream from his pen in German, with translations into French, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Finnish, etc., quickly following.
Came the year 1965, a red letter year for me, for in that year Roepke extended to me an urgent invitation to come to Geneva as a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies with the intention that I should succeed him in his Chair there. This was a compliment than which I could think of none higher. Also, in that year, my doctoral dissertation, a study of the German economy done under Roepke's guidance, was published. I accepted Roepke's invitation with the understanding that it would be an experimental undertaking, initially for one year-I had my fully Americanized family to consider-and transplanted myself, with wife, four small children, and books, to Geneva. What a joy and privilege it was to work alongside my great teacher, now my colleague, a man whom I had always addressed as "Professor" and who now beseeched me to skip this formality and to call him simply "Roepke." We visited often with Roepke and his wife, Eva-they were fond of my children. This close acquaintance emphatically confirmed my previous impression of him as a true gentleman: generous to a fault to his rivals and opponents (of whom there were many), with never a hint of the odium academicum that infects so much of university life, at Geneva and elsewhere. And I greatly enjoyed my teaching duties at the Institute.
Then came that Saturday morning in February, 1966, when, for a reason I have now forgotten, I drove to the Institute. It was a crisp wintry day. The refurbished chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva housing the Institute was open for students who wanted to use the library. The trees on the grounds were bare of leaves, imparting to the place a mournful aspect, as I recall. There was a thin haze on the Lake but one could see the glistening peak of Mont Blanc in the distance. I mounted the steps and saw that some students had gathered at the door. There were murmurs and I heard the name "Roepke." They looked at me, their faces were ashen, some tear-stained, and I knew that Wilhelm Roepke, doughty champion of liberty and human dignity, colleague, and beloved friend, was dead.
His obsequies were attended by leading scholars and condolences came to Eva Röpke from heads of state from half a dozen European nations. From the little church in Cologny, not far from his beautiful home on the shores of Lake Geneva, where the funeral services were held, we, several hundred of us, students, friends, and colleagues, followed his bier, banked high with flowers, through the narrow village streets to the cemetery where he was laid to rest. Requiescat in pace.
It is important to note that when Wilhelm Roepke died on February 12, 1966, in his 67th year, at his home in Geneva, in the floodtide of his powers, full of honors, and with a veritable mountain of achievement behind him-his bibliography then comprised over 900 items, including some 20 books-this calamitous event was noted on the front pages of virtually every major newspaper in Western Europe. Had there been a Nobel prize for economics during his lifetime-it was first awarded in 1969-he surely would have been a strong contender for it. And for many days thereafter Roepke's life and works were the subject of extensive comment and analysis, not alone in professional economic circles, but in the popular media.
5. Roepke and American Economists
In contrast, in the United States his passing went practically unnoticed, though The New York Times did manage to squeeze in a reference to it in four lines in the back of the paper as follows: "Prof. Wilhelm Roepke, a German economist and sociologist, died suddenly in Geneva yesterday, following a heart attack, his family said. He was a former advisor to the German Government and author of many books on economic subjects." Worse, in another report of the death, a conservative columnist in a Midwestern newspaper, otherwise admiring of Roepke and his work, referred to him as "this relatively obscure man"! And elsewhere there was silence as well. But this was simply reflecting an unfortunate fact: though famous in Europe, and in Japan for that matter, and with his name now being heard even in China, Roepke was and is still not known in United States by any but a few specialists, including those attending this meeting, and the more's the pity.
As late as 1996, this situation had not changed. During the Presidential campaign of that year, audiences were startled to hear from one of the Republican candidates impassioned denunciations of heartless employers and greedy corporations that exported American jobs overseas in search of profit. Such rhetoric had more commonly emanated from ultra-liberal Democrats. The candidate in this case was Pat Buchanan
Where did Pat Buchanan claim to get his economic ideas? When Time Magazine posed this question to him, he answered: Wilhelm Roepke, whom Time then described as "an obscure German economist who died in 1966." It is to Buchanan's credit that he displayed a more accurate awareness of Roepke's real stature than the Time reporter. Doubtless too, Buchanan saw in Roepke's philosophy of "the third road" a worthy exemplar for the United States. More wrong facts, in any case, appeared just this year in Buchanan's book, The Great Betrayal, in which, and apart from misspelling Roepke's name, he again claims intellectual kinship with Roepke, though his book is an aggressively protectionist tract at odds with everything Roepke believed and taught concerning the international economy. Compounding the misinformation was a lengthy review of Buchanan's book in The New York Review of Books which misidentifies Roepke as an Austrian economist! In any case, to Roepke Buchananite xenophobia and economic autarky would have been simply anathema.
6. Roepke's Conservatism
A principal reason, in my judgment, in accounting for the American ignorance of and/or disinterest in Roepke, is that his "Weltanschauung"-his total conception of economy, society, and human destiny-has found relatively little echo among those in this country who could be presumed to be his closest ideological confreres, the conservative economists. Among these latter, a few of them giants in their own right, will be found those who are straightforward, unapologetic supporters of a laissez-faire economy. But, as noted, one of Roepke's major contributions has been to show the threat posed to the very survival of a free economy by a policy of laissez-faire. Also, there is room for doubt whether Roepke's frequent denunciations of industrial giantism, of the cult of the colossal and of the super-colossal, in short, of monopolism in all its forms, has earned him many points with another segment of the American public that might logically be expected to support his ideas-the business community. Consider, for instance, this statement from Economics of the Free Society:
"Our economic system stands or falls with competition, since only competition can tame the torrent of private interest and transform them into a force for good… the conclusion can no longer be avoided that the growth of monopoly represents an extremely serious disfigurement of our economic system. To effectively fight monopoly … it is necessary to have a strong state (italics added)-impartial and powerful-standing above the mêlée of economic interests, quite contrary to the widely held opinion that "capitalism' can thrive only where there is a weak government. The state, unmoved by ideologies of whatever brand, must clearly recognize its task: to defend 'capitalism' against 'the capitalists'".
7. The Role of Government
Again, those American conservative economists whose escutcheons bear the maxim "government is the problem, not the solution," will not be enthused by Roepke's approach to the role of government in the market economy. In his view of the functions of government, Roepke had much in common with his great predecessor, Adam Smith. When we read The Wealth of Nations with care, we note, some of us, I presume, with great surprise, that Smith was not the unconditional champion of a limitless laissez-faire policy as he is often portrayed. Even in 1776, it was evident that if the maximizing of one's own interests were pursued in an inappropriate or conflicting context of the larger society, e.g., under the threat of war, or where competition is enfeebled or absent, or where other necessary elements of the meta-economic structure are missing, the postulated benevolent social outcomes of the market will be frustrated.
Like Roepke, Smith was an exceptionally harsh critic of individuals and groups whose interests collided with the general welfare and argued in consequence for a strong state to ensure that the two converged. In particular, he worried about the fragility of competition, noting in a famous line that "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." How contemporary that sounds! Would Smith have approved such governmental interventions as the antitrust laws? I believe he assuredly would have. Certainly Roepke did, approvingly citing the American Sherman and Clayton Acts as examples for all market economies to follow. I venture to say that Roepke, while he would have been admiring of the entrepreneurial spirit of Bill Gates, would also have been solidly in the corner of the U.S. government in its current effort to rein in Gates and his behemoth Microsoft Corporation. Parenthetically, Germany's own antitrust law enacted in 1958, a first of its kind, was modeled after the U.S. law and became known as the "little Sherman Act."
Here is Röpke's prescription for government, in his words:
A market economy and our economic program presuppose the following type of state: a state which knows exactly where to draw the line between what does and what does not concern it, which prevails in the sphere assigned to it with the whole force of its authority, but refrains from all interference outside this sphere-an energetic umpire whose task it is neither to take part in the game nor to prescribe their movements to the players, who is, rather completely impartial and incorruptible and sees to it that the rules of the game and of sportsmanship are strictly observed. That is the state without which a genuine and real market economy cannot exist. Benjamin Constant envisaged it when he wrote the words 'Le gouvernment en dehors de sa sphère ne doit avoir aucun pouvoir; dans sa sphère, il ne saurait en avoir trop.' ['Outside of its proper sphere, the government should have no power; within its sphere, it cannot have too much.']"
8. Economic Models: the German and the American
The striking current success of the American economy-the unprecedented coexistence of high employment, low inflation, and substantial real growth over an extended period which has characterized it-would have been applauded by Roepke. He would, however, have pointed out that in economics, as with the weather, the future remains uncertain and that the United States, no more than any other nation, is not immune to what is happening in the international economy. Similarly, Germany's economic policy blunders and its repeated deviations in recent years from the prescriptions of the social market economy would have earned his scorn, as indeed they did during his lifetime. He would have been especially heartened by these critical components of the U.S. performance: the unwavering anti-inflationary posture of the American central bank, the Federal Reserve; the trimming back of the overblown American welfare state; and the elevation of fiscal integrity, i.e., the holding of government spending within the limits of its revenues, as a top national priority.
Certainly, too, the current budget surplus of the United States he would have found especially worthy of congratulation, much as he had looked back with nostalgia to similar such surpluses in the early years of the German social market economy. He would, I believe, also have cautioned against reading too much into Germany's current economic problems. After all, it remains the strongest economic power in Europe by far; its currency, though soon to be eclipsed by the euro, is the bellwether of all others in Europe; and while unemployment remains too high, per capita income is at an historically high level and rising. Presumably these indicators would be even more favorable but for the enormous additional burdens on the economy attendant on the reunification with East Germany. One may add that precisely because Gerhard Schroeder, the new Chancellor, is to the left of Helmut Kohl, he may be more successful than the latter could be in trimming back Germany's welfare state to a more sustainable level, much as Clinton managed to do following two Republican Administrations with their legacy of budget deficits. In the German case, that is, of course, a hope rather than a firm conviction.
9. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
I close with a passage from one of Roepke's last letters to his sister, Grete Willgerodt, dated April 1, 1965, that displays, among other things, his passion for gardening.
"My dear Grete, When I rest, I feel exceptionally well and recently I've been sleeping quite soundly. Rest is what my two doctors have prescribed as the most important medicine: no physical exertion and no psychic stress. Conclusion: no more trips, neither to Rome, nor, as we were hoping to manage as a substitute, to southern Germany, or even to Zurich. The business of being confined to Cologny is not at all cause for disappointment. We have discovered a new formula for happiness: to plan a trip and then to stay home, where it's so beautiful. At this very moment, there's all kinds of things to be taken care of in the garden. Hyacinth, tulips, narcissus, scilla, arabis, crocuses of course, anemone-everything is already blooming; and ribes sanguinea and forsythia will soon be sprouting buds. The lawn awaits its first mowing; in that massacre will be caught up, regretfully, dandelion and similar inferior species! It's time for the first seeding, and so on. I must clean out the pond, drain it to the bottom, and in the process speak nicely to the fishes so that they understand that I only mean them well. Watching them dart about in the clear water so merrily, I have the feeling that they've understood that a guardian angel has watched over them. Are we not really like these fishes?"
That is the end of the letter. In tandem with it, it is worth noting that Voltaire's famous aphorism, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin," was one of Roepke's favorites. It appears often in his writings and illumines his two deepest attachments: on the one hand to home and hearth, to all that is made to the measure of man, and beyond that, to liberty. Thus his fierce determination to battle tyranny from wherever and whomsoever it might come.
10. Honors
Wilhelm Roepke was the recipient of innumerable honors and decorations, among them the Cremisini prize for literature in translation (Italy), the doctorate honoris causa from Columbia University, the University of Geneva, and the Technical University of Munich, and the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany. The citation which accompanied the presentation to him of the Pirkheimer Medal in 1962 expresses tersely but accurately the essential orientation of his whole system of thought: "The measure of the economy is man. The measure of man is his relation to God."
German Commercial Policy, William Hodge & Co., London, 1934.
Crises and Cycles (tr. of Krise und Konjunktur),William Hodge & Co., London, 1936.
International Economic Disintegration, William Hodge & Co., London, 1942.
The German Question (tr. of Die deutsche Frage), William Hodge & Co., London, 1946; American edition, The Solution of the German Problem, Putnam, New York, 1947.
Civitas Humana (tr. of Civitas Humana), William Hodge & Co., London, 1949; reissued as Moral Foundations of Civil Society, Library of Conservative Thought, Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University, Brunswick, NJ, 1995.
The Social Crisis of Our Time (tr. of Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1950; reissued, with an introduction by William F. Campbell, Library of Conservative Thought, Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994.
Welfare, Freedom, and Inflation, William Hodge & Co., London, 1957; reissued, with a foreword by Roger A. Freeman and an introduction by Graham Hutton, University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama, 1964.
International Order and Economic Integration (tr. of Internationale Ordnung), Reidel, Dordrecht, 1959.
A Humane Economy (tr. of Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage), Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1960; reissued, with an introduction by Dermot Quinn, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware, 1998.
Economics of the Free Society (tr. by Patrick M. Boarman of Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft), Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1963. Currently available from Libertarian Press, paper, 1994, and from Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Against the Tide (translations of selected essays by Roepke, most of which appeared in the
anthology in German entitled Gegen die Brandung), Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, 1969.
Currently available from Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 3901 Centerville Road, Wilmington, DE
19807-0431.
Copyright © by Patrick M. Boarman 1998
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