By training, I am an historian.  I love the discipline and believe that historical mindedness — the ability to see and understand the grounding of current institutions, issues, and events in the complex matrix of the past — this is the superior way to make sense of reality.

All the same, I have been troubled for over a decade by the growing interest of American conservatives in the history of their cause.  This is not to criticize fine books such as George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.  Nor is it to imply that ignorance is the better strategy for guiding a cultural, political, and intellectual campaign.  Nor is it to deny that any movement calling itself “conservative” must, by definition, have a healthy — even determinative — regard for the past.

My concern is over a kind of triumphalism that has crept into American conservatism, a neo-Hegelian view that sees this cause rising out of the intellectual rubble of the Truman era, destined by the spirit to history to create mass publications, to control the radio airwaves, to found great think tanks, and to dominate a political party.  This version of history sees the apotheosis of the movement in the creation of FOX News.  This has actually tended, I believe, toward a narrowing of thought, and a closing off of healthy debate.

Well, I am not a Hegelian and I have agreed to speak about “Learning from Conservative History,” so let me turn to that.  I will first examine four “Main Trails” that converged over the last sixty years to form American conservatism.  I will then examine the legacy of the conservative ascendancy.  Finally I will explore several “less-travelled paths,” forms of conservatism largely abandoned along the way.

The oddest thing about modern American conservatism is that it emerged during the late 1940’s and 1950’s, a time of perhaps unparalleled American power, economic expansion, and social order.  The United States came out of World War II with an unprecedented military machine, and an astonishing global presence.  The American industrial economy was the wonder of the world.  The Bretton Woods agreement delivered stability to international finance and opened markets to American goods.  American capitalists, demonized during the 1930’s, were heroes again, patriots all, and relatively humble in their compensation claims.  Every year, hundreds of thousands of American families moved up into the middle class, becoming homeowners in the burgeoning, optimistic suburbs.  The American welfare state, organized around the New Deal’s social security, was modest in its claims and popular.  The national debt was manageable, and shrinking as a percentage of Gross National Product.  Most unexpectedly, negative family trends of a century’s duration had all reversed.  A marriage boom commenced; the average age of first marriage fell to 22 for men and around 20 for women:  records both.  By age 40, 95 percent of American adults were married.  More dramatic was the Baby Boom.  Overall, the U.S. fertility rate nearly doubled between 1940 and 1957.  Defying a law of sociology, the greatest rise in fertility was among women who had attended college.  Following a post-war spike, even the divorce rate fell steadily through the 1950’s.  Church construction was booming; the Sunday schools were bursting at the seams with little Christians.  As LIFE magazine summarized in 1960, “the American people did all these things and more.  They did them under the benign and permissive Eisenhower sun,” an era “in which so many age-old visions of the good life first became real.”

So, just what was the problem?

The Libertarians  

One set of answers came from a group of economists, loosely called the libertarians.  A number of them had been raised and trained in Europe, only to become refugees from Nazism or Communism.  Perhaps this grounding in Old Europe gave them a stronger sense of history, a deeper perception that allowed them to see beyond certain superficialities.  They were vividly aware of how near the destruction of all human freedom had recently come.  In 1940, Bolshevism and its collectivist economy dominated the earth’s greatest land mass, the Soviet Union.  National Socialism in Germany was proving to be a remarkably effective vehicle for building racial empire through an economy planned for conquest.  Other fascist variations — also harnessing the power of strident nationalism to socialist forms — were popping up around the globe:  most effectively, the Japanese militaristic model.  Historian John Lukacs has suggested that the United States and the British Empire, by themselves, could probably not have prevailed over this descending darkness.

Economist Friedrich Hayek’s masterpiece The Road to Serfdom, written in 1942 (but published after the war), ably captures the time.  Pointing to both German Nazi and Russian Soviet examples, he concludes that “the cry for an economic dictator is a characteristic stage in the movement toward planning.”  And economic planning was the great trap.

Only Adolf Hitler’s remarkable invasion of the Soviet Union — a war of choice on his part — and the consequent troubled alliance of Great Britain and America with the USSR, only those things allowed democracy to survive in Western Europe.  However, victory over one totalitarian system quickly gave way to new problems: an expansive and again belligerent Communist Russia; and a newly emboldened Democratic Socialism.  Even in Britain and America, many now believed that “democratic” economic planning had been vindicated by the war.  In Great Britain, the Labour Party swept to power with a program of socialist planning.  In America, Keynesianism — the demand-side theories of John Maynard Keynes — became the new orthodoxy.  In liberated Europe, other political leaders turned to economists such as the social democrat Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden, who served as the Executive Secretary of the influential Economic Commission for Europe.

Hayek and other “Austrian economists” such as Ludwig von Mises settled in America.  They raised their banner against Keynesianism, arguing instead for liberty, including a free economic system involving deregulation and faith in market forces.  While building on somewhat different assumptions, American-born economists at the University of Chicago — notably Milton Friedman and George Stigler — agreed with the Austrians that Keynesian economics rested on contradictions that hampered efficiency, limited growth, and encouraged unhealthy “rent seeking.”  They warned that the American prosperity of the 1950’s was precarious, the result of historical accidents that would not last.

The Traditionalists  

Another set of warnings came from writers usually labeled “traditionalists.”  In his 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, rhetorician Richard Weaver argued that the true Western philosophical consensus had dissolved.  Practical men — “those in charge of states, of institutions, of businesses” — now faced the task of persuading “to communal activity people who no longer have the same ideas about the most fundamental things.”  With the then ubiquitous Life magazine especially in mind, Weaver said that vested interests now tried to maintain traditional values artificially.  They had constructed what he called the “Great Stereopticon,” a medium, which projected “selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated.”  Moreover, these “metaphysicians of publicity” pressed the idea that the goal of life was “happiness through comfort.”  Weaver believed, however, that the true result was “a sickly metaphysical dream,” too weak to sustain anything more burdensome than easy abundance.

Russell Kirk of Michigan also had no illusions about the American miracle of the 1950’s.  A ruralist himself, he held no sympathy for the burgeoning suburbs.  Referring to Long Island, he wrote:

During the late fifties..., I watched ...the devastation of what had been a charming countryside....To make room for a spreading population was necessary, but to do it hideously and stupidly was not ineluctable.

Elsewhere, he called “this brutal destruction of the very landscape...a belligerent repudiation of what we call civilization.  It is a rejection of our civilized past.”  So much for the creature comforts of Levittown.

Kirk’s essential project was to recover and animate an American conservative philosophy.  His great teacher in this respect was the British statesman Edmund Burke.  From him, Kirk adopted the concept of “moral imagination,” which he described as an intuitive human power to perceive ethical truths and a natural law within the apparent chaos of experience.  He traced the legacy of Burke’s “moral imagination” through American philosophers and poets, including Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and T. S. Elliot.

Kirk called “traditions” the “wisdom of the [human] race; they are the only sure instruments of moral instruction..., and they teach us the solemn veneration of the eternal contract which cannot be imparted by pure reason.”  He defined traditions as “presumptive social habits, prejudices, customs and political usages, which most people accept with little question, as an intellectual legacy from their ancestors.”  Kirk readily acknowledged that change must and would occur.  Yet such reform had to take place within sound tradition.  Moreover, while Kirk praised free enterprise as “the most productive and most [generous] economic arrangement conceivable,” he cautioned that a market economy could only survive within a web of custom, religion and community.

The Fusionists  

Libertarians and Traditionalists:  these were the two strands of a proto-conservatism that emerged in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.  William F. Buckley, a son of Yale University, took on the task of unifying them — fusing them — in the journal National Review, launched in 1955.  “Ordered liberty” became the catch phrase.  Early results, though, were not encouraging.  Friedrich Hayek, for example, saw no grounds for cooperation.  And while he regularly wrote for National Review, Kirk turned down an invitation from Mr. Buckley to become an editor.

It was from Frank Meyer, who did serve as an editor at the magazine, that fusionism gained theoretical coherence.  His book In Defense of Freedom described conservatism as an embrace of “the Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of man”; while “reason operating within tradition” formed the core principle of the West.  Meyer argued that the American founders had adopted the “fusionist” scheme of James Madison, instead of the “authoritarian” ideas of Alexander Hamilton or the “libertarian” approach of Thomas Jefferson.

Still, many traditionalists and libertarians refused to buy into fusionism.  Politicians, however, found it immensely useful.  As Senator Barry Goldwater explained in his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, the conservative approach “is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today.”  Freedom and order became his catchwords.  In his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention, Goldwater declared:  “This party...has but a single resolve, and that is freedom — freedom made orderly for the nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature’s God; freedom — balanced so that order, lacking liberty, will not become a slave of the prison cell; balanced so that liberty, lacking order, will not become the license of the mob and the jungle.” So did fusionist conservatism reach into the Republican Party.

Of course, the golden days, the “happy days”, of the 1950’s did come to an end.  Actually, the year 1964 is an excellent choice to mark the advent of the notorious “60’s”.  Some wag once said that if you can remember the 1960’s, you weren’t there.  Whatever the case, over a ten-year period, the Potemkin village that had been Eisenhower’s America mostly crumbled.  The counter-culture, the drug-culture, the New Left, bra-burning feminism, the political assassinations, the sexual revolution, the blood claimed by a land war in Asia:  these and more tore through American culture, leaving it disfigured.  By 1974, America was in global retreat, with the fate of South Vietnam soon to be sealed.  The American economy was in serious recession; the Keynesian bromides no longer worked.  The divorce rate was soaring; the marriage rate tumbling; the Baby Bust was in full swing; and abortion-on-demand was the law of the land.

These disorientations actually generated two new elements of the emerging American conservative coalition:  the neo-conservatives; and the Religious Right.

Neo-Conservatives and the Religious Right  

A neo-conservative has been defined as “a liberal mugged by reality.”  There is truth here, but the ideological origins of the neo-conservatives were more complex.  Some such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell emerged out of the radical politics centered around the City University of New York during the 1930’s, where as young men they had tried on Marxism.  Others such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick were Roman Catholics disturbed by the liberal utopianism and irrationality of the New Left.  Concerning domestic politics, they used social science to counter ambitious radicalism, a recurrent theme in the late journal The Public Interest.  They also defended the limited New Deal welfare state as necessary to social peace.  In foreign affairs, they advocated a strong anti-Communism, and they defended the state of Israel from New Left criticism.  More broadly, they believed that the United States must continue the role of global policeman, lest chaos ensue.  In economics, neo-conservatives such as Michael Novak became exuberant cheerleaders for what they called Democratic Capitalism.

The Religious Right was a product of the 1970’s.  Its first manifestation came in 1972 as Phyllis Schlafly of Illinois launched her remarkable and successful campaign to stop the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment.  When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, creating a right to abortion, most evangelical Protestants actually were unconcerned.  Some prominent evangelical figures even welcomed the decision as an advance of religious liberty, against Roman Catholic machinations.  However, over the next several years, Protestant writers including Francis Schaeffer and Harold O.J. Brown reawakened the evangelical conscience over abortion.  In 1977, the new Jimmy Carter Administration launched a series of bizarre initiatives against American churches.  The Carter regime wanted to regulate religious fundraising, to strip some Christian schools of their tax exemption, and to otherwise narrow religious exemptions from Federal oversight.  Carter’s promised White House Conference on The American Family became instead a conference on “American Families,” where concerns over soaring levels of divorce, abortion, and illegitimacy were displaced by a strange celebration of unmarried mothers and other “new family forms.”  All these developments led to new organizations, ranging from the poorly named, short-lived, but influential Moral Majority to the formidable Focus on the Family.  Centuries-old suspicions between conservative Protestants and orthodox Catholics definitely gave way to a new spirit of practical alliance.

The Reagan Coalition  

Ronald Reagan drew these four strands — libertarianism, traditionalism, aggressive anti-Communism, and Christian activism — together in his successful run for the Presidency in 1980.  In declaring his candidacy, he famously announced:

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality — and above all — responsible liberty for every individual; that we will become that shining city on a hill.

Well, as of early November, the Reagan Era is over.  The conservative political coalition that kept the California governor, his Vice President, and that V.P.’s son in the White House for 20 of the last 28 years, and that brought Congress under Republican control for a dozen years:  that coalition was pretty well drubbed.

There had always been tensions within:

• Traditionalists were troubled by the libertarians’ lack of respect for the transcendent moral order and by what they saw as the neo-conservatives’ messianic view of foreign policy.

• Libertarians distrusted the traditionists’ call for order, the neo-Conservative faith in government, an activist foreign policy, and war, and the Religious Rights’ insistence on a normative family structure.

• Neo-conservatives were put off by what they considered the musty Toryism of the traditionalists, by the libertarian faith in a spontaneous international order, and by the anti-intellectualism of the religious Right.

• The Religious Right saw libertarians as “libertines” and constantly found Christian “Main Street” values subordinated to “Wall Street” priorities. 

These tensions became more visible as the “glue” of anti-Communism faded away after 1990; but the coalition soldiered on, most recently under John McCain, to the dawn of the Age of Obama.

Where are we now?  

In foreign affairs, the United States is caught in two Middle Eastern wars.  While matters have surely improved in Iraq — more through short-term deals cut with tribal sheikhs and ethnic leaders than through military victories — while Iraq is better, the situation in Afghanistan steadily deteriorates.

And in economics, the United States is in an odd and oddly crippling recession, triggered by financial speculation in American housing and insurance markets and reverberating around the globe.

Fairly or not, American conservatism as defined by the Reagan coalition appears to be taking the ideological fall, so-to-speak, for these circumstances, particularly for the consequences of the Bush Doctrine in foreign affairs and of deregulation in the economic sphere.  As conservatives reassemble in the post-Reagan era, I suspect that a new variation, a different kind of coalition, may be necessary.  What might it look like?  Alas, that is the arena of the futurist, not the historian.  However, there have been other “conservative” possibilities in the past, paths that were not followed.  Perhaps one or more of these might help provide a more coherent response to the new circumstances of our time.

Less-Travelled Paths:  

…Distributism

One less-travelled path could be labeled Distributism, American style.  In 1934, a young American journalist and historian — Herbert Agar — wrote a long essay for the American Review, entitled “The Task for Conservatism.”  It reflected the six years he had just spent in England, working as a junior editor at G.K.’s Weekly, the journal published and edited by G.K. Chesterton.  While embracing the label “conservative,” Agar stated that it had been thoroughly “discredited,” twisted by what he called the apostles of plutocracy into a defense of “gamblers and promoters.”  He now wanted to save the term, by appealing to “another, and an older, America,” a time when there was virtue in and a moral plan for the nation.

Central to this plan, Agar insisted, was “the widest possible distribution of property.”  Among some of the American founders, such as Jefferson, “this [had] meant agrarianism,” or self-sufficient farming.  To others, such as John Adams, “this [had] meant an interdependent community” of farmers and modest merchants, with government maintaining the balance.  Agar insisted that all the founders believed that “a wide diffusion of property...made for enterprise, for family responsibility, and in general for institutions that fit man’s nature.”

But America, he continued, had lost its way over the course of the 19th Century.  The natural wealth of the nation tied to the industrial revolution had raised “the rewards for a successful raid on society to dangerous heights.”  Protestant Christianity went into decline, proving incapable of restraining economic “buccaneers.”  Property grew concentrated; the sharecropper replaced the yeoman; the renter replaced the homeowner; factory workers fell into dependence on an hourly wage; democracy degenerated toward mob rule.

Could the situation be reversed?  Agar thought it possible that trends had gone too far in the wrong direction.  “If Americans have come to believe that a wage is the same thing as freedom; if they prefer such a wage, with its appearance of security, to the obvious danger and responsibilities of ownership, then they cannot be saved from the servitude which awaits them.”  Yet, he concluded that a “redistribution of property” could still be accomplished; this would be “the root of a real conservative policy for the United States.”  The ownership of land, machine shop, store, or a share of “some necessarily huge machine” needed to become the normal thing, to set the moral tone for society.  Such a system, though, was not in line with existing trends.  “It must be produced artificially,” Agar said, “and then guarded by favorable legislation.”  He argued for differential taxation on business profits and corporate-held property, to favor the small, family-held operation.

Following Chesterton and his sometime collaborator Hilaire Belloc, Agar also warned against an informal merger between Government and the great Banks and Corporations.  In this scheme, financiers would continue their speculations and consolidations, while the state would confirm workers in their dependent status through a minimum program of social insurance and welfare, tied to wage labor.  The result would not be socialism, Agar explained, but what Chesterton called the Business Government or what Belloc labeled the Servile State.

…Communitarian  

A second less-travelled path was conservative communitarianism, a defense of society’s little platoons, a suspicion of all big entities, including the great corporations and the national security state.  While prefigured in Burke and also to be found in Russell Kirk, this orientation received full expression in the work of sociologist Robert Nisbet.  His 1953 book Quest for Community focused on “the individual uprooted, without status, struggling for revelations of meaning, seeking fellowship in some kind of moral community.”  Nisbet dissected what he called the “ideology of economic freedom” falsely built on an atomistic view of human nature.  He argued that “the so-called free market never [really] existed at all save in the imaginations of the rationalists.”  The 19th century capitalist system seemed to work, Nisbet asserted, only because it had inherited the moral capital of truly natural communities — the family, the village, the church — “which had nothing whatsoever to do with the essence of capitalism.”  Direct social affiliation alone brought acceptable order:  “Not all the asserted advantages of mass production and corporate bigness will save capitalism if its purposes become impersonal and remote, separated from the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human life.”

Nisbet said something similar about the national security state.  In an essay entitled “Uneasy Cousins” he compared and contrasted libertarianism and traditionalism, here called conservatism:  He reported:  “...there is a common dislike of war and, more especially, of the war-society this country knew in 1917 and 1918 under Woodrow Wilson and again under FDR in World War II.”  Nisbet noted that opposition to America’s modern wars, from the Spanish-American conflict on, “...came from those elements of the economy and social order which were generally identifiable as conservative — whether ‘middle western isolationist,’ traditional Republican, central European ethnic, [or] small business....”  These were persons “closely linked to...church, local community, family, and traditional morality.”  Nisbet concluded:  “This was the element in American life, not the miniscule libertarian element, that both Woodrow Wilson and FDR had to woo, persuade, propagandize, convert, and, in some instances virtually terrorize in order to pave the way for eventual entry by U.S. military forces in Europe and Asia.”

…Cultural Pessimism  

A third less-travelled path is the original cultural pessimism of the neo-conservatives.  An exemplary expression of this was Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.  In brief, Bell argued that the frenzied economic impulse of capitalism had long been held in check by Puritan restraint and the Protestant ethic.  While these checks permitted great capital accumulation, they also limited sumptuary or extravagant consumption.  “One worked because of one’s obligation to one’s calling, or to fulfill the covenant of the community.”  “Being moral meant being industrious and thrifty.”  “If one wanted to buy something, one should save for it.”  Alas, according to Bell, the Protestant ethic of vocation and thrift was done in by capitalism itself.  He wrote:

The greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the invention of the installment plan, or instant credit.  Previously one had to save in order to buy.  But with credit cards one could indulge in instant gratification.

The creative trick here was to avoid the word “debt,” while emphasizing the word “credit,” allowing everyone to live beyond their means...for a time.

Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of neo-conservatism, also linked “the decline of the bourgeois ethic” to the “drainage of legitimacy out of the business system” in his 1978 book, Two Cheers for Capitalism.  Crafting a sharp critique of Friedrich Hayek, Kristol charted the transformation of the United States from “a capitalist, republican community, with shared values and a quite unambiguous claim to the title of a just order” into “a free, democratic society” where “the will to success and privilege had been severed from all moral moorings.”  In short, “the dynamics of capitalism itself,” especially the building of a system of easy consumer credit, subverted both virtue and justice, bringing the whole system into crisis.

Dismantling the Servile State, building a true Distributist property state, defending small communities of virtue from mega-systems, exposing within capitalism the corrupting influence of a culture of debt:  these paths once less-travelled may be of greater appeal to a future William F. Buckley and to the next American conservatism.

Wilhelm Roepke was an unusual free-market economist working in a difficult time.  I believe that we should see him, first of all, as a product of 1914, the year which launched what he called “the devastation on so gigantic a scale to which mankind, then having gone mad, dedicated itself.”[1]  Mustered to war as a young man, Roepke served in the trenches on the Western Front.  He concluded that a civilization “capable of such monstrous depravity must be thoroughly rotten.”  Roepke pledged that if he “were to escape from the hell” of the Great War, he would devote his life to “preventing the recurrence of this abomination.”  He also resolved that war “was simply the rampant essence of the state,” collectivism run amuck, and he launched his life-long “struggle against economic nationalism..., monopolies, heavy industry and large scale farming interests,”[2] all of which he believed had given encouragement to the terrible conflict.

A second starting point for his economic views was Christian.  A descendent of German Lutheran pastors, Roepke held to that concept which “makes man the image of God whom it is sinful to use as a means” and who embodies inestimable value as an individual.  Noting that the idea of liberty had appeared uniquely in Christian Europe, he concluded “that only a free economy is in accordance with man’s [spiritual] freedom and with the political and social structures ...that safeguard it.”[3]

The key pillar of that social structure, Roepke maintained, was the natural family.  Along with religion and art, he held that the family did not exist for the state, but was “pre-statal, or even supra-statal.”[4]  In its essence, family life was “natural and free,” while the “well ordered house” served as the very foundation of civilization.[5]  Derived from “monogam[ous] marriage,” he said that the family was “the original and imperishable basis of every higher community.”[6]  The “centre of gravity” for planning and living one’s life should be in that “most natural of all communities — the family unit.”[7]  The autonomous family also stood first “in opposition to the arbitrary tendencies of the state.”[8]  Indeed, the natural family became the touchstone of his quest for a truly Humane Economy.

And yet, despite this strong affirmation of the natural family as critical to free society, Roepke’s analysis also led him to several conundrums or dilemmas surrounding family life.  For example, he avoided discussing ways in which certain incentives of a free economy might tend to weaken family bonds.  Surprisingly, Roepke was also hostile both to the American “Baby Boom” and to the new suburbs in which the young Boomers lived.  He criticized the creation of large families, although these were in practice a common and fairly natural product of happy home life.  For related reasons, he frequently fretted about population growth.  Meanwhile, he encouraged public policies that actually had pro-natalist, or pro-birth effects.  What were the sources of these conflicting views?

The Humane Economy, Family Style  

We should start by examining in more detail the family nature of — or the place of the family in — his desired Humane Economy.  Emerging from the Great War, Roepke found himself engaged in an intellectual battle on two fronts.  As he later reported:  “I sided with the socialists in their rejection of capitalism, and with the adherents of capitalism in their rejection of socialism.”[9]  By capitalism, Roepke did not mean the free market.  Rather, the term “capitalism” embodied for him “the distorted and soiled form which market economy assumed” in the period between about 1840 and 1940.[10]  The liberal quest for economic liberty had gotten off track in this era, he asserted, producing effects that would pave the way to socialist collectivism; specifically:

...the increasing mechanization and prolitarization, the agglomeration and centralization, the growing dominance of the bureaucratic machinery over men, monopolization, the destruction of independent livelihoods, ...and the dissolution of natural ties (the family, the neighborhood, professional solidarity, and others).[11]

The task facing the modern economist, Roepke said, was to eliminate “the sterile alternative” between a return to 19th Century laissez-faire and 20th Century collectivism.  The needed “free economic constitution,” as he phrased it, would embrace certain basics:  “the market, competition, private initiative, a free price structure and free choice of consumption.”[12]  Roepke praised the true market economy as the only system “which releases the full activity of man so natural to him while, at the same time, [curbing] his hidden tigerish tendencies which, unfortunately are no less natural to him.”[13]  A system of free economic competition alone could deliver “discipline, hard work, decency, harmony, balance and a just relation between performance and payment.”[14]  It was also the only system compatible with protection of the free personality, which offered men and women the liberty to tackle challenges in the domains of culture, the intellect, and religion.

All the same, a market economy was not easy to achieve.  As Roepke explained, “it is an artistic construction and an edifice of civilisation which has this in common with political democracy:  it demands and presupposes... the most strenuous efforts.”[15]  Among other needs, the free market required a “high degree of business ethics together with a state ready to protect competition.”[16]  Looking to the failures of the 19th Century, Roepke was relentless in exposing the “sins” of monopoly, including:

Privileges, exploitation, ...the blocking of capital, the concentration of power, industrial feudalism, the restriction of supply and production, the creation of chronic unemployment, the rise in living costs and the widening of social differences, lack of economic discipline, [and] the transformation of industry into an exclusive club, which refuses to accept any new members.[17]

He favored legal devices such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act found in America to protect competition from these disorders.

Roepke was also an enthusiastic champion of free international commerce.  A healthy economy, he insisted, “does not place collectivist shackles on foreign trade.”  Efforts to build high tariff walls, he believed, actually “impoverished” small-scale producers.  He consistently called for “a liberal and multilateral form of world trade with tolerable tariffs, most-favored-nation clauses, the policy of the open door, the gold standard, and the elimination of closed compulsory [trading] blocks.”[18]

The restoration of private property was also central to Roepke’s vision.  The antithesis to socialist or collectivized man was the property holder.  Roepke explained that competition was only one of the pillars of a free economy.  The other was personal and familial “self-sufficiency.”  Accordingly, expansion of the sphere of competition should be balanced by enlarging what he called “the sphere of marketless self-sufficiency.”  This meant “the restoration of property for the masses,” a “lengthy and circumspect” program that would discourage the accumulation of big properties, use “progressive death duties” to break up large estates, and redistribute land to propertyless families on favorable terms.  As Roepke wrote:  “the industrial worker...can and ought to become at least the proprietor of his own residence and garden...which would provide him with produce from the land.”  This alone would render each family “independent of the tricks of the market with its wage and price complexities and its business fluctuations.”[19]

Indeed, Roepke held an almost religious faith in the transformative power of the private garden.  As he wrote, the keeping of a family garden “was not only ‘the purest of human pleasures’ but also offers the indispensable natural foundation for family life and the upbringing of children.”  In praising the “Magnetism of the Garden,”[20] he told the story of a friend who was showing the family gardens of several workers to a “dogmatic old-time liberal;” some think this was Ludwig von Mises.  In any case, Roepke continued:  “on seeing these happy people spending their free evenings in their gardens,” the laissez-faire liberal “could think of nothing better than the cool remark this was an irrational form of vegetable production.”  Roepke retorted:  “He could not get it into his head that it was a very rational form of ‘happiness production’ which surely is what matters most.”[21]

Still, Roepke acknowledged that it was not certain “that people really want to possess property.”  Actually, “to hold” land presupposed much more:  “frugality, the capacity to weigh up the present and the future, a sense of continuity and preservation, the will to independence, [and] an outstanding family feeling.”[22]

The necessary task, he said, was broader still:  a “deproletarization” that would take industrial workers who lacked roots in “home, property, environment, family, and occupation” and transform them into free men.  This meant, in Roepke’s mind, “rendering the working and living conditions of the industrial worker as similar to the positive aspects of the life of the peasant as possible.”  Beyond his praise for family garden homes, the economist celebrated businesses like Switzerland’s Bally Shoe Company which actively assisted its workers in acquiring houses and land and supported their small agricultural endeavors with ploughing services, fertilizers, locally adapted seeds, and special animal stock.  All of these initiatives were designed, Roepke said, “to save [these families] from their proletarian existence.”  The result would be the citizen free of the vagaries of the business cycle “who, if necessary can find his lunch in his garden, his supper in the lake, and can earn his potato-supply in the fall by helping his brother clear the land.”[23]

To heal the distortions of human life wrought by 19th Century laissez-faire Capitalism, Roepke even sought to undo — in some degree — the urban-industrial revolution.  Writing in The Social Crisis of Our Time, he called for nothing less than the “drastic decentralization of cities and industries, [and] the restoration of some more ‘natural order’.”[24]  He labeled the modern big city a “monstrous abnormality,” a “pathological degeneracy” that devitalized human existence, adding:  “the pulling down of this product of modern civilisation is one of the most important aims of social reform.”[25]  Relative to the decentralization of industry, he urged that “the artisan and the small trader” receive “all the well-planned assistance that is possible.”  He also saw promise in the rise of the “tertiary,” or service sector.  Moreover, Roepke believed that recent technological advances — electric motors, the internal combustion engine, compact machine tools — these lent new competitive advantages to small enterprises.  Anticipating Prairie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor (who has said that you buy local products at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery in Lake Wobegon instead of at the Mall in St. Cloud, because Ralph is your neighbor), Roepke urged that consumers “should not shrink from the sacrifice of a few cents in order to carry out an economic policy of their own and support [local] artisans to the best of their ability and for the good of the community.”[26]

This process of “deproletarization” also meant restoration of a peasantry:  a countryside of small family farms.  Roepke called the peasantry “the very cornerstone of every healthy social structure” and “the backbone of a healthy nation.”  Sounding here like Thomas Jefferson, or the Southern Agrarians of the 20th Century, he continued:  “A peasant who is unburdened by debt and has an adequate holding is the freest and most independent man among us.”  The peasant household also showed “that a type of family is possible which gives each member a productive function and thus becomes a community for life, solving all problems of education and age groups in a natural manner.”  Given these qualities, Roepke held that “a particularly high degree of far-sighted, protective, directive, regulating and balancing intervention [by the state in agriculture] is not only defensible, but even mandatory.”  He looked with particular admiration to the relatively advanced peasant farming systems then found in Switzerland, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, and France, and he looked with particular hope to the prospects for specialized production in dairy, eggs, meats, fruits and vegetables.[27]

Another component of the Humane Economy would be a limited, but real welfare or social security system.  Roepke did condemn the cradle-to-grave approach of Great Britain and Scandinavia, where “a large part of private income is continually being fed into the pumping station of the welfare state and redistributed by the state, with considerable wastage in the process.”  He stressed the corrupting effects on the broader economy of this “everything in one pot, everything out of one pot” scheme, including the suppression of capital investment, the loss of individual initiative, and inflation.[28]  Moreover, such a system was like “a powerful machine that has neither brakes nor reverse gear,”[29] ever encroaching “upon the area of self-providence and mutual aid” so that “the capacity [and willingness] to provide for oneself and for members of one’s family...diminishes.”

All the same, Roepke acknowledged the need for “a certain minimum of compulsory state institutions for social security.”  There must “naturally be room,” he said, for public old-age pensions, health and accident insurance, widow’s benefits, and unemployment relief in a “sound...system in a free society.”  The imperative was to keep the scheme limited, providing only a floor of support.  He had special praise for the Swiss and American social security systems, circa 1960, which recognized and defended these necessary limits.[30]

Roepke called his whole program a “Third Way,” one which would reconcile “the immense advantages of the free market economy with the claims of social justice, stability, dispersal of power, [and] fairness.”[31]  This program favored “the ownership of small- and medium-sized properties, independent farming, the decentralization of industrial areas, the restoration of the dignity and meaning of work, the reanimation of professional pride and... ethics, [and] the promotion of community solidarity.”[32]  This Third Way also sought “the organic building-up of society from natural and neighborly communities...starting with the family through parish and county to nation.”  Alone, this Third Way rendered “possible a healthy family life and a non-artificial manner of bringing up children.”[33]  Indeed, “simple, natural happiness” would come from placing humans “in the true community that begins in the family” and exists “in harmony with nature.”[34]

The Costs of Family Decay  

Viewing the Western world in the middle decades of the 20th Century, Roepke identified the negative consequences of “spiritual collectivism, proletarization,...and centralization,” the “most serious” of which was “the disintegration of the family.”  Usually propertyless and without productive function, the modern family was “degraded to a mere consumers cooperative...often without children...or without the possibility of bestowing on them more than a summary education.”[35]  Along with this “disruption of the Family” went “the loss of a sense of ‘generations’ [where] the individual loses...his sense of the continuity of time and the relationship of the dead to the living and [of] the living to their successors.”[36]  Things were “fundamentally wrong,” Roepke said, in those nations “where the most natural actions of man like...caring for his family, saving, creating new things or raising children must be instigated by propaganda...[or] moralizing.”[37]

And yet, Roepke’s analysis of and prescription for the social crisis of his age involved troubling paradoxes or dilemmas over the natural family.  For example, where his contemporary Joseph Schumpeter and later analysts such as Daniel Bell argued that certain incentives within the market economy tended to weaken family bonds,[38] Roepke seemed unconcerned.  Notably, he largely ignored the market’s latent demand for the labor of married women.  He did argue that family was “the natural sphere of the woman” and that the decay of autonomous homes made “the female half of society” into real victims, but he apparently did not see this in any way as the result of legitimate market incentives.  Instead, Roepke seemed to blame the “bad” capitalism of the 19th Century for this result.[39] 

It was true, of course, that equity feminism — a common companion to a free labor market — had made little headway into his model domain of mid-20th Century Switzerland.  Most married women there still were hausfrauen, or housewives; indeed, women did not even gain the vote in that Alpine land until 1971, five years after his death.  Roepke simply assumed that the male breadwinner/ female homemaker family would prevail in the Humane Economy.

Roepke was also direct witness to the burgeoning American suburbs of the 1940’s and 1950’s, where young adults fled the overcrowded cities to create child-centered homes, each complete with housewife, lawn, and garden.  And yet, instead of praising this process as an aspect of decentralization, he condemned these new creations.  At the more objective level, he pointed to “the danger that [such] decentralization will become a mere extension of the big city into the country along the main roads.”  This would amount “to a mere decentralisation of sleeping quarters whereas the big city would still remain the centre of work, shopping and pleasure.”[40]  Meanwhile, he predicted that traffic problems derived from suburbia would grow insoluble, creating a “hell of congestion.”

At a more viscereal level, Roepke objected to the superficial charm and hyper-”gregariousness” of the new American suburbs.  “Everybody is forever ‘dropping in’ on everybody else,” he complained.  “The agglomeration of people [in the suburb] stifles all expression of individuality, any attempt at keeping to oneself; every aspect of life is centrally ruled.”  Roepke especially indicted the “pressure...to take part in [suburban] communal life,...unless [one] wants to be known as a spoilsport.”  He concluded that trying “to escape from the giant honeycombs of city dwelling, into the suburbs is to jump from the frying pan into the fire.”[41]

More curiously, this great champion of the “natural family” showed an emotional dislike of human numbers, involving direct and implied condemnation of the large family.  In A Humane Economy, for example, Roepke complained about “the visible crowdedness of our existence, which seems to get irresistibly worse every day,” the “masses of people who are all more or less the same,” the “overwhelming quantities of man-made things everywhere, the traces of people,” “this deluge of sheer human quantity,” and the emergence of humankind as the “parasite of the soil.”[42]

Roepke did recognize on occasion the reality of anti-natalist tendencies in modern life.  In his 1932 work, What’s Wrong With the World?, he linked the global agricultural depression of the prior decade to “the slowing up of the growth in population.”[43]  He acknowledged that birth control “techniques which permit the separation of sexuality and procreation” spread ever more widely.  He continued:  “Old mores have succumbed to new attitudes until the practice of birth control has become increasingly a simple matter of habit.”  Roepke attributed the use of birth control, in part, to “deliberate selfishness” and concluded that “the modern rationalist spirit” could “drag down both the birth rate and the moral health of the nation.”  He even acknowledged that “the birth rate...can theoretically fall to zero...resulting in an absolute diminution of population.”[44]

However, his more usual message was a condemnation of those economists who defended population growth as a good.  Roepke denounced the “blindness,” the “criminal optimism,” and the “strange mixture of statistics and lullabies” which overlooked the dangers of expanding human numbers.  He denied the “bold theory” that it was population growth “which imparts dynamism to the industrial counties.”  He mocked the argument that “the more cradles there are in use, the greater is the demand for goods, the higher is the investment,...the more vigorous is the boom.”  He labeled it “a degradation of man and of the great mystery of creation to turn conception and birth” into vehicles for economic expansion.  Roepke considered the formation of a large family to be an irresponsible act.  He pointed to the Baby Boom in America, fueled by an average family size of about four children, as particularly “new and disturbing.”[45]  He concluded:  “Every thinking person must...admit that, sooner or later, it will become necessary to restrain such population increases....  So why not sooner than later?”[46]

How might we explain these views?  To begin with, Roepke advanced the unusual argument that the processes of industrialization, centralization, and proletarization were in fact the consequence of too many children.  During the 19th Century, he explained, birth rates in Europe had remained high while death rates fell, producing “the swamping effect of the incredible increase of population.”  Roepke noted that each new generation is like a horde of little barbarians.  If parents could not tame them, disaster resulted; adding:

Now since this increase in population took place largely in circumstances and among classes in which this taming, i.e., cultural assimilation was less and less successful, we have been obliged in effect to experience a barbarian invasion out of the lap of our own nation.[47]

This flooding of the earth with a “mass” was “bound to stamp its mass character” on the whole civilization.  It had produced an “orgy of technology,” “mammoth industries,” “bloated big cities,” a “materialist and rationalist life without tradition,” “the undermining of everything permanent and rooted,” and “the subjugation of the whole globe by a mechanical, positivist civilization.”  Roepke asserted that it would be impossible to build a humane economy “when the industrial nations of the West are improvidently taking a new demographic upsurge for granted.”[48]

Second, he embraced an analytical Malthusianism premised on the calculation of an optimum population for each nation.  While the Reverend T. R. Malthus had failed as immediate prophet, Roepke said, the Anglican priest had correctly asked why every economic gain achieved by “the labors and ingenuity of the existing population” should be immediately “claimed by millions of new individuals instead of serving to increase the well-being of those now on earth.”[49]

And third, like many other mid-century analysts, Roepke grew mesmerized by population growth projections which counted 300 Billion inhabitants on the Earth by the year 2300.  In such an anthill existence, he asked, what would happen to those “unbought graces of life”:  “nature, privacy, beauty, dignity, birds and woods and fields and flowers, repose and true leisure.”[50]

Roepke insisted that “a stabilisation of population” was “an indispensable prerequisite of the restoration to health of our society.”  Yet he was vague in explaining how to reach this goal.  In one passage, he suggested that the three-child family would allow for “a healthy and normal family life” while “in no way” opposing “the stabilisation of population.”[51]  In another place, though, he implied that “overpopulation” in Europe would require a two- or even one-child family system to restore economic equilibrium.[52]

In retrospect, we can see that Roepke greatly over-estimated the procreative potential of late 20th Century Western peoples.  The surge in numbers during the 19th Century was over by 1920.  Indeed, fertility had been falling throughout Europe, North America, and Australia-New Zealand since at least 1880; and in France and the United States, since 1820.  Post-World War II “baby booms” were fragile events, the products of unique social forces that would not last.  Post-family attitudes, closely linked to a strange combination of democratic socialism with secular individualism, eventually carried the day.  As would be clear by the year 2000, below-replacement fertility and depopulation represented the real Western future.[53]

In his public advocacy, Roepke posed still other dilemmas regarding the natural family.  For example, his plan to resettle industrial families in semi-rural homes, complete with a vegetable garden and simple animal husbandry, ran counter to his demographic goals.  As he was well aware, such an existence would give “the family with many children those conditions which transform a heavy burden to be endured...into something natural, stimulating and immediately worthwhile.”[54]  As an economist, Roepke should have realized that this would in turn create incentives for more children, for larger families.  Put another way, his goal of fertility limitation would have been best achieved by leaving families in large cities where children became ever more costly luxuries.

A similar contradiction emerged in his advocacy regarding social security.  As noted earlier, Roepke urged creation of a limited system of public pensions, “putting a floor” under the feet of “the weak and helpless” and preventing their fall “into bitter distress and poverty; no less, no more.”  Such a system, he insisted, should not drive out other forms of old-age support, including private savings and annuities and the aid provided to aging parents by grown children.[55]

Roepke was right in seeing such a system as possible and socially constructive.  Ironically, though, new research shows that moderate-sized public pensions such as found in the United States during the 1950’s actually have a positive effect on fertility:  that is, they encourage larger families.  Indeed, it appears that the pre-1965 American system of limited state pensions was a contributing factor to the Baby Boom.[56]

Conversely, it has been fairly clear since the late 1930’s that large, publicly-funded pensions discourage fertility and larger families.  Explained briefly, such a system socializes the “insurance value” of children, so punishing parents who raise the young while rewarding their “free-riding,” childless neighbors.[57]  Once again, if a decline in fertility was his primary goal, Roepke should have encouraged ever larger state pensions.

Roepke as Successful Prophet  

Fortunately, though, Roepke’s priority lay elsewhere.  While raising the matter in the context of the population question, he had a larger purpose in asking:

[W]hat happens to man and his soul?  What happens to the things which cannot be produced or expressed in monetary terms...but which are the ultimate conditions of man’s happiness and of the fullness and dignity of his life?[58]

In finding answers, Roepke was — and is — correct in trying to rehabilitate social life by returning human beings to decentralized, autonomous, self-sufficient, functional homes, where education and real work would be reintegrated into the daily flow of family living.  Toward this end, he correctly saw mid-20th Century Switzerland to be a model state.  “As the common enterprise of freedom-loving peasants and burghers,” he wrote, “it has offered the world a living example of the harmonious integration of [rural] and city culture.”[59]  He described a real village of about 3000 people with nearby farmsteads in the Bern Mittelrand, a place which combined artisan shops, small factories, a brewery, a dairy for cheese, a “highly tasteful” book store, and “a great collection of obviously thriving crafts and craftsmen.”  He added “that the whole place is remarkable for its cleanliness and sense of beauty; its inhabitants dwell in houses which anyone might envy; each garden is lovingly and expertly tended; [and] antiquity is protected....  This village is our ideal translated into a highly concrete reality.”[60]

Roepke’s analysis also points toward ways to achieve this ideal in our new century.

•  His goal of “genuine decentralization” through “the creation of fresh small centres in lieu of the big city” anticipates the New Urbanism of our day, where attention to the physical settings of real neighborhoods combines with a reattachment of work and retail sites to family residences.[61]

•  Roepke’s reminder that certain technological innovations may support the broad dispersal of productive work gains new importance in the age of the home computer and the extraordinary economic democracy of the internet.  Indeed, the German-Swiss economist had challenged technologists “to serve decentralisation instead of centralisation, rendering possible the greatest possible number of independent existences and giving back to human beings as producers and workers a state of affairs which would make them happy and satisfy their more elementary and most legitimate instincts.”[62]

•  Roepke’s attention to “tertiary production,” or the service sector, as a growing sphere for human labor again enhances the prospects for small and medium businesses which might support household independence.[63]

•  And Roepke’s insights regarding the competitive advantages held by small family farms in the production of specialty crops gains new relevance in the age of organics.  Indeed, here in America at least, the last decade has witnessed an explosive growth in farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, and independent organic farms, with farm income soaring.  As the editor of Small Farmers’ Journal recently declared, “There has never been a better time to be a farmer.”[64]

These are the areas where Roepke succeeded as both analyst and prophet.  He was also prophetic in  seeing that the civilizational crisis of the Christian West derived from “a cultural retreat,... a squandering of our inheritance” linked to “a continuous process of secularization.”[65]  He wrote that the core of “the malady from which our civilization suffers lies in the individual soul,” adding that this disease would also only be “overcome within the individual soul.”[66]  Here, too, we can safely conclude that Wilhelm Roepke was altogether correct.

Endnotes: