Monday marked the 90th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in Nazi Germany. Writing for the always interesting Law & Liberty, the inestimable Samuel Gregg (also a National Review contributor) notes the occasion by highlighting someone who stood up to the Nazis, and from whose example we can still learn.
That someone is Wilhelm Röpke, the great ordo-liberal German economist. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a National Review contributor, Austro-Hungarian nobleman/anti-nationalist monarchist/free-marketeer, and friend of Röpke, once lamented that Röpke had “lamentably few” followers. But in Gregg, Röpke has someone more than willing to steward his legacy.
Gregg focuses on Röpke’s stand against the Nazis. As they gradually grew in power and influence before Hitler’s assumption of power, Röpke was steadfast in his criticism of them:
“You will be complicit,” he wrote in one 1930 election pamphlet, “if you vote Nazi or for a party that has no reservations about forming a government with the Nazis.” That pointed “or” was a shot at those conservative political and military elites who, three years later, would allow Hitler into office under the illusion that they could control him.
So, in February 1933, when Röpke, then a university professor, denounced the Nazis, he was being consistent. And straightforward:
National Socialism’s triumph constituted, Röpke stated, a defeat for reason and freedom. The Nazi movement, he told his audience, with its naked appeal to “moods and emotions” and constant invocation of “myth,” “blood,” and the “primordial soul” left no room for such things.
Not only, Röpke insisted, were “stupidity and stupor” being “inculcated in a way that beggars description”; “every immoral and brutal act,” he observed, “is justified by the sanctity of the political end” for the Nazis. The threats to destroy entire groups—“Jews in Germany” and “hereditary enemies of all kinds”—were not, Röpke argued, mere rhetoric designed to whip up populist resentment that would be quietly shelved once the Nazis took power. It was integral, Röpke knew, to the entire National Socialist project.
Röpke’s lecture is admirable in itself. But it is also noteworthy in that Röpke didn’t have to give it. As Gregg notes, he was not Jewish, was a decorated veteran of World War I, and even physically resembled the Aryan ideal. He had achieved international renown as a successful economist and academic. Had he compromised, he could have prospered under the Nazi regime. But he chose not to. As a result, his academic career in Germany ended, and he was forced into exile.
We have plenty of shameful contemporary counterexamples. Consider one who is getting recognized more and more these days: Carl Schmitt. (Schmitt’s argument that the friend-enemy distinction is the essence of politics is one of his more enduring, ah, contributions.) Schmitt spent World War I in the German military bureaucracy, not the trenches. He was a notable legal theoretician in interwar Germany, serving as a lecturer in various posts and occasionally entering public service. Though in late Weimar years he became “a juridical apologist for rule by presidential decree,” as Reinhard Mehring, professor of political science at the University of Education, Heidelberg, notes in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, he did not publicly support the Nazis before January 30, 1933. Thereafter, he engaged in political maneuvering that enmeshed him in the Nazi government’s bureaucracy, eventually becoming its primary legal theoretician (“crown jurist,” as Mehring puts it). This regime toadying earned him offers of academic postings in Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin; he eventually accepted one at Berlin University and remained at it until 1945.
Schmitt at first seemed to maintain a hope that Nazi government could be “stabilized,” his own version of the naive belief that Röpke denounced. But eventually, he gave up on even this pretense, justifying Nazi rule in an article titled “The Fuhrer protects the law.” Later, he offered justifications for the Nuremberg Laws (“the Constitution of Freedom,” he called them) and organized a conference on “Jews in Jurisprudence.” As Mehring notes, he was not obligated to do any of this; his secure university post would have permitted silence.
In the obvious respect of their relationship to the Nazi government, it is clear who comes out ahead in a contest between Röpke and Schmitt. But there is something additional about Röpke that Schmitt also helps illuminate. The politics of interwar Germany were a mess of discontent. One of the primary centers of that discontent were the “German nihilists” of which Leo Strauss, a German emigre and political philosopher, later spoke. Many of these nihilists were associated with the “Conservative Revolution,” a philosophical school that, among other things, rejected the liberal Weimar Republic and the world of the “open society” for which it stood. As Strauss put it, their protest against such a society
proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness. Moral life, it is asserted, means serious life.
“Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness the flag and the oath to the flag, are the distinctive features of the closed society,” Strauss added. The implication being, of course, that the liberalism on offer in Weimar Germany was, at best, unable to satisfy these important needs, and, at worst, was actively inimical to them. Strauss’s conclusion, furthermore, was that the attempted refutations of these nihilists — virtually all of them young men — failed by not even trying “to understand the ardent passion underlying the negation of the present world and its potentialities.” Schmitt emerged out of this toxic milieu with a harsh, uncompromising philosophy, held in studious contrast to milquetoast Weimar liberalism, that held out the friend-enemy distinction as the root of politics; he went far with it. Strauss, for his part, criticized Schmitt for a kind of reflexive anti-liberalism that, ironically, failed to gain “a horizon beyond liberalism,” so there are other critiques one can make of Schmitt and the German nihilists that needn’t originate from a position of squishy, affective centrism.
By the time Röpke gave his anti-Nazi address in 1933, there was doubtless little Röpke could do to stop the Nazis. But his address nonetheless advanced an alternative both to the toxic stew out of which both Nazism and Schmittism emerged, and to the deracinated liberalism Weimar offered, which provided little obstacle to Nazi dominance. It was a more robust, more civilizational worldview, one that drew not from shallow roots but from the Western inheritance. As Gregg puts it:
. . . liberalism served in Röpke’s lecture as a synonym for the integration of Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian, and Enlightenment ideas, culture, and institutions that, he believed, constituted the civilization of the West. Nazism—and Bolshevism, for that matter—should, Röpke maintained, be recognized as an insurrection against that particular complexion of concepts, expectations, and institutions.
The source of Röpke’s liberalism was not Kantian, but Greek and Roman Stoics, Christianity, natural law, and the Enlightenment. These sources can be discordant, a discord out of which wisdom can emerge. But for Röpke, “taken together” they “rejected ‘the principle of violence in favor of the principle of reason.’”
At the heart of this broader and more vigorous liberalism was a defense of individual dignity, which he defined as “the profound conviction that man must never be degraded into an object.” This was the source of Röpke’s objection to oppression. As Gregg puts it:
A coherent conception of tolerance itself was impossible, [Röpke] noted, without an in-principle affirmation of every individual’s inherent dignity—not least because it ruled out treating one’s political opponents as “enemies” who belonged to a different group, and who would ultimately have to be reduced to the status of non-citizens or expelled from the body-politic altogether.
But Röpke’s liberalism was not empty of content. For him, liberty was more than “to be free from something.” It also meant being “free for something”: “nothing less than ‘civilization’—’the very air’ without which we ‘cannot breathe.'”
And this liberty went, for Röpke, together with his view of reason. Properly understood, reason was not focused merely on empirical or utilitarian concerns, but involved “the absolute pursuit of truth.” Gregg elaborates:
If societies wanted to be free, [Röpke] added, they had “to accept reason as the common denominator.” For reason, combined with respect for freedom and each individual’s dignity, was indispensable for the liberal constitutionalism and rule of law that inhibited the type of arbitrary power that the Nazis would take to new levels. To violate the rule of law, Röpke underscored, was to behave in an inherently unreasonable manner, not least because it invariably involved choosing to treat individuals as things and to crush their liberty. Therein lay the path to “servilism” and the “total state.”
We cannot assess the counterfactual of whether Röpke-ism might have sated the Weimar discontent out of which Nazism eventually emerged. Perhaps he was too late; perhaps he had too few allies. Edmund Burke once said that “when bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” (The failure of good men to associate against the bad is a recurring political problem.)
But Röpke’s sacrifice need not be unpitied. Indeed, his answer to liberal discontent is worth considering in a new light amid contemporary debates about whether what passes for liberalism today — so often empty, procedural, and devoid of content — can prevail against challenges from both the far-left and far-right, each of which claims to supply things a denatured, sterile liberalism cannot. Against such challenges, mere liberalism could whither once again. As Richard Reinsch has noted, such a liberalism “will not lead to human flourishing nor will it satisfy the questioning and endlessly alienated souls of human beings.” But backed with the inheritance of Western civilization; infused with pre-liberal virtue, possessed of an understanding (to quote Reinsch once more) “of the human person who must live a life in common with others, but who, most significantly, is a being of eternal significance and cannot be defined by the state”; and channeled into the right institutions and frameworks (specifically, those bequeathed by the American Founding), a more-muscular, decidedly not-neutral liberalism can succeed where its predecessor failed.
After World War II ended, Röpke helped rebuild the German economy, while Schmitt attempted to salvage his own intellectual influence, in some measure succeeding, based on the fact that he still has fans today. But the historical record is clear as to which of the two performed more admirably. Let us take from the contrast what we will.