"The Wilhelm Roepke Solution to Our Economic Woes"

Explained by Dermot Quinn, professor of history at Seton Hall University and a fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University — Too Small to Fail.

"The key to Roepke’s thinking is freedom," notes Prof. Quinn, who goes on to explain that "his notion of freedom was profoundly communitarian, rooted as it was in certain moral understandings of man and the good life, of human beings living together in honorable interdependence, of families being free because obliged to each other."

Roepke "understood economics in deeply religious terms, as a kind of magnificent participation in creation itself," and "distrusted all forms of collectivism." Writes the author, "An Aristotelian preference for balance and variety, a Burkean delight in the little platoons, a Chestertonian love of the local and the down-to-earth—that was Roepke."

"Roepke was appalled by the sheer vastness of the modern state," and "offered, instead, the more modest proposal that self-reliance—'the individual taking care of himself and his family'—was the foundation upon which all economics and politics should be built."

I've blogged before about this great thinker:

• Wilhelm Röpke
• An Austrian School Distributivist?
• Röpke on Centrism and Decentrism
• A Humane Austrian
• A Call for Peace Between Paleo-libertarians and Neo-distributists
• Wilhelm Röpke, Libertarian Traditionalist
• Again, the Great Wilhelm Röpke
• Yet Another Wilhelm Röpke Post
• Wilhelm Röpke, Libertarian Traditionalist
• Look to Wilhelm Röpke
• The Austrian School and Distibutivsm
• The Humane Economist
• A Roepkean in the House
• A Libertarian Looks to Belloc, Röpke, Agrarians, and Distributists
• Where Röpke and Schumacher Meet