Both markets and morals: The conservative liberalism of Wilhelm Ropke
Alexander Salter
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American conservatives have always supported the politics of freedom and virtue. But which comes first? Cold War conservatism posited a “fusion” of order and liberty. Politics can promote man’s ennoblement in civil society, but only indirectly. Liberty is the essential goal of politics.
This consensus is now under siege. A new cohort of right-wing thinkers contends that liberty has devolved into license, and the only way to revitalize society is to make virtue, not freedom, the object of our politics. Patrick Deneen, a political philosopher at Notre Dame, argues the culprit was America’s Faustian bargain with Enlightenment liberalism. Adrian Vermeule, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard, thinks the Right’s favored hermeneutic of originalism is played out and thinks a more communal, morally thicker framework should take its place. Journalist Sohrab Ahmari wants nothing less than “a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” that is, God.
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But what if this debate misconceives the relationship between order and liberty? A long line of conservative liberals — philosophers and statesmen who decried the affronts to human dignity caused by an activist government yet understood the importance of community and tradition for human flourishing — shows us a promising way to navigate the freedom-virtue debate. Contrary to the old conservatives, liberty is not the single end of politics. And contrary to the new conservatives, liberty and order are not substitutes but complements.
Nobody knew this better than Wilhelm Ropke. An economist by training and one of the architects of Germany’s “economic miracle” following World War II, Ropke was also a social philosopher deeply concerned with human dignity. His magnum opus, A Humane Economy, was widely praised, even by Russell Kirk, the doyen of traditionalist conservatism who held otherwise low opinions of economists. Ropke’s work is the place to start for those seeking a synthesis of virtue and freedom.
Ropke was a classical liberal in politics, a capitalist in economics, and a Christian humanist in arts and letters. This is precisely the combination of scientific economics and artful political economy that we need to learn, to borrow a phrase from Deirdre McCloskey, “how to be human, though an economist.” We can’t shackle our market-based economy and expect to remain free and prosperous. At the same time, we shouldn’t demand markets give us merchandise and meaning in equal parts. Ropke’s humane economy consists of organic and overlapping institutions, each addressed to a permanent human need. The key is striking the right balance.
Ropke is particularly concerned with “proletarianization,” the atomization of society caused by stripping away all intermediary institutions between human persons and the soulless bureaucracies, both corporate and governmental, to which they are increasingly subject. We need economic freedom to resist proletarianization. But we also need security and independence. The public, and hence the state, has a compelling interest in achieving these goods. Hence, Ropke champions free enterprise, but not an a priori devotion to laissez faire. Edmund Burke would approve.
“I speak as a liberal,” Ropke asserts, in trusting “the spontaneous and free co-operation of the people through the market, price, and competition.” Property rights and the rule of law are essential for promoting human dignity. But healthy markets are not sufficient for a healthy society. We also need “widely dispersed” property, “genuine communities, from the family upward,” and “counterweights” to all-encompassing competition. Man is made in God’s image, Ropke believed, and his highest calling is fulfilled in community. Order in the soul reflects order in the body politic, of which commerce is only one member among many. No “free-market fundamentalism” here.
Many economists would be uncomfortable with Ropke’s calls for regulating market power and redistributing wealth. Reasonable people can disagree about the prudence of specific policies, especially in an era as bereft of statesmanship as ours. His proposals are tailored to the concerns of time and place and might not meet contemporary challenges. What matters is his political-economic vision: the possibility of a free and virtuous society founded on God, family, and liberty.
We don’t need to settle whether freedom or virtue is the first principle of politics. We do need to appreciate their essential complementarity and come up with an agenda for ordered liberty. Rather than rehash old debates, American conservatives should follow the trail Ropke blazed.
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Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder associate professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute. This article is an edited excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good (CUA Press, June 2023).