Wilhelm Röpke

Wilhelm Röpke ( born October 10, 1899 in Schwarmstedt in Hannover, † February 12, 1966 in Geneva ) was a German economist and social philosopher. He is considered one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy.

Life

Wilhelm Röpke grew up in a liberal bourgeois country doctor's family. After graduating from the Athenaeum in Stade in 1917 he began the study of law and political science in Göttingen, later moved to Tübingen, then to Marburg. There, he turned to the study of economics and graduated in the spring of 1921 with distinction. He then accepted a position as an assistant at the Political Science Seminar in to his supervisor Prof. Walter Troeltsch. Roepke habilitated in 1922 as Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Marburg and was appointed at the age of 24 years as the youngest German professor at the University of Jena.

This was followed by a stay in the USA as a visiting professor at the Rockefeller Foundation, the appointment to the University of Graz and in 1929 a professorship at the University of Marburg, where he served as professor of political economy until 1933. Politically, Röpke was engaged: Under the pseudonym " Ulrich Unfried " he wrote articles against the corporatist economic policy ideas of the conservative- revolutionary "act " circle around Hans Zehrer and Ferdinand Fried (hence the nickname). Röpke warned already at the general election in 1930 before the NSDAP in a leaflet to the Lower Saxon peasantry. After he had then spoken in a lecture on 8 February 1933, Marburg immediately after the "seizure of power " Hitler of it, " that a mass uprising against the ultimate foundations everything has dawned of what we culture call: a mass revolt against reason, freedom, humanity and against those written and unwritten norms that have arisen over millennia to provide a highly differentiated human community, without lowering the people slaves of the state. "he was on leave from his teaching post and fled in the same year into exile in Turkey. , where he taught at the University of Istanbul and wrote his most successful book the doctrine of the economy, which was the theoretical basis of his later economic and socio- political publications. winter semester 1937/38, joined Röpke to Geneva for an unusually fruitful activity as professor exercise in international economics at Geneva's Graduate Institute of international Studies. A PhD student of him in Geneva was Carl Zimmerer. In the 1940s, he started for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Schweizer Monatshefte writing, for which he wrote more than 30 articles. In Geneva, he brought his socio-philosophical trilogy ( Social Crisis, Civitas humana, International Order ) to paper, the basic principles he developed in Istanbul with its local faculty colleagues Alexander Rustow. In it he described - in the principles with the representatives of the Freiburg School agree - his vision of economic order. In the course of conservative impact in thinking Röpke was stronger. This was clearly above all in the in " Beyond Supply and demand " expressed cultural criticism.

Röpke 1947 was a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society and its president from 1961 to 1962. In the 1960s, there was an altercation between a group led by Friedrich August von Hayek and a group led by Albert Hunold and Röpke about the future direction of the company. As a result, Röpke resigned the presidency and resigned from the Mont Pelerin Society.

He was with Eva, born Finke, married, with whom he had three children together. He is not related to the Marburg economist Jochen Röpke.

Teaching

Law, custom, morality, norms and value beliefs were crucial elements always have to take care that not the market, but the political level and the central bank for the economics professor. With a " compliant " Socio-economic and financial policies, whose job it is to protect " beyond the market " Weak to compensate interests to set rules and to limit power, Röpke sought an economic order of "economic humanism ", which is called by him the "Third Way ". Röpke stands for a society and politics, for the protection of human rights is of paramount importance. The so-called "individual " principle as an important and fundamental core of the market economy must be kept in his view, with a thoughtful social and principle of humanity in balance. In European politics, he warned against too much centralism.

The catchy phrase " The equilibrium price clears the market ," the overall economic optimum demand coverage includes, comes from him. Through all his work belongs to the liberal economist who published more than 800 titles in over four decades, to those economists who have significantly influenced as scientists and policy advisors to develop in post-war Germany. For Ludwig Erhard he was "in the best sense, a fighter for the highest values ​​of humanity."

Honors

Works

• Crisis and economic. Leipzig 1932.
• The doctrine of the economy. Bern 1937. (Main, Bern 1994, ISBN 3-8252-1736-1 )
• The economic elements of the peace problem. Polygraphischer Verlag, Zurich, 1937.
• The Social Crisis. Zurich 1942. (Main, Bern 1979, ISBN 3-528-02870-2 (formally wrong ISBN ) )
• Civitas Humana. Fundamental questions of social and economic reform. Zurich 1944. (Main, Bern 1979, ISBN 3-258-02871-0 )
• The German question. Rentsch, Erlenbach ZH 1945.
• International Order. Rentsch, Erlenbach ZH 1945. ( Haupt, Bern 1979, ISBN 3-258-02872-9 )
• The crisis of collectivism. Munich 1947.
• Doctrine of the Mean. Rentsch, Erlenbach ZH 1950. ( Haupt, Bern 1979, ISBN 3-258-02874-5 )
• Beyond supply and demand. In 1958. ( Publishing House of the craft, Dusseldorf, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86950-036-2 )
• Against the surf. Rentsch, Erlenbach ZH 1959.
• Confusion and truth. Rentsch, Erlenbach ZH 1962.
• Fronts of freedom. Stuttgart 1965.