Face in the Crowd, November 2, 2002

Unlike other economists, he confronted the subjective, human elements and prerequisites which made a free society possible. This meant understanding man as a spiritual being, not as an object or statistic. He knew that life was too messy and too majestic to fit into rows and columns. The social, moral, and political framework that sustained ordered liberty and the good society had to be conserved, even if this meant occasional government intervention, contra Hayek and Mises, and its conservation relied upon the health of human beings. Necessarily, then, there was an interest in ones values. If we recall the truism that everything that we do affects someone in some way, we are compelled toward some sense of responsibility. Therefore we ought to keep in mind not merely the freedom to choose but the content and consequences of those choices.

Throughout the book, Ropkes prescription is decentralism, decongestion and deproletarianisation in state and society. He rejected the cult of the colossal for the human scale: small business over large; private property, home ownership, and roots over endless mobility; craftsmanship over cheapness; teamwork, loyalty, and trust over every man for himself competition; dignified work over mechanical labor; human contact and community over bureaucratization and anonymity; and in all a reliance on things local rather than on a distant megalopolis, centralized business concern, or federal government.

Against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few he placed the mediating institutions of family, church, and local community. As Tocqueville recognized, these institutions provided psychological, spiritual, and social sustenance while putting limits on the power of the state and big business to tyrannize and homogenize society. Ropkes interest in the human scale led him also to some prophetic remarks on technology, overpopulation, suburban sprawl, the automobile, and the attraction of rootless individuals toward crime, terror, and mass political movements.

Written in 1944, in the midst of war and other centralizing conditions, Moral Foundations lacks the coherence and the more readable translation of A Humane Economy, written fifteen years later. William Campbells introduction pays tribute to Ropke but does not discuss the volume at hand. Readers may also grow impatient with Ropkes habit of leaving entire passages of French and German untranslated, as well as his tendency to bury important points in his end notes.

His prescriptions for postwar Germany, particularly his call to break up monopolies, were ignored then just as similar prescriptions are ignored today in the United States. Yet with his emphasis on the humane, the moral and the social, he still has much to teach us.