[Liberals in Your Pocket] Wilhelm Röpke

Mass Democracy as the Soil of Revolutionary Social Religion

Röpke (Wilhelm Ropke, 1899–1966)

- Born in Hanover, Germany

- Ph.D., University of Marburg, 1921

- Professor at the University of Jena, 1924

- Professor at the University of Marburg, 1929

- Fled the Nazis and went into exile in Turkey, 1933

- Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland, 1937

- Major works: The Crisis of Our Time (1942), A Humane Economy (1946), Beyond Supply and Demand (1958), among others

“This ‘spiritual radicalism’ of modern mass society, which constantly raises new questions about everything and makes it impossible for anything firm to exist—whether social foundations and roots, fundamental principles, or historically formed institutions—empowers leaders who loudly promote momentary amusement, pleasure, and vulgarity, artfully dressing them up with grandiose rhetoric. In this way, mass democracy becomes the soil of revolutionary social religion.”

— From Beyond Supply and Demand —

Röpke says that if private property or inheritance rights are rendered unstable and uncertain by the arbitrariness of the administrative state or by elections; if they become hostages to those who have little or no property; and if their standing as rights so self-evident and fundamental that they require no further justification is shaken, then the end of a free society is near.

According to Röpke, democracy and liberty can coexist in the long run only if everyone with the right to vote—or at least the majority of them—agrees that in public life and in the economic constitution there are certain ultimate norms and principles, such as the inviolability of private property, that must never be infringed even by democratic decision. Otherwise, that society is entering the earlier form of a collectivist mass society, whose final destination is totalitarianism.

The welfare state leads people to live in dependence on the state and government and, in the end, to live off taxpayers’ pockets. This is not progress. Röpke says that true progress lies in enabling people to build their own lives on the basis of respect for free and mature human beings.

---

Original title: [주머니 속의 자유주의자 ] 뢰프케(Wilhelm Ropke)

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2005-12-20

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=21&idx=10666