Wilhelm Röpke

Because if you go back to, say, the 1940s, where classical liberalism is in big trouble, it's becoming extinct almost.

When you read people like Hayek from that period, but also people like, say, Wilhelm Röpke, they talk about civilization all the time.

Keynes talked about this, used this language of civilization to talk about what he thought was the mission of economists, but also how he understood the wider vista that we needed to understand economics.

He even gave a speech when he was finishing up as editor of the, I think it was the Economic Journal in 1946, I think it was, or 44.

So that's one way of talking about civilization.

And that's certainly how some mid-century classical liberal economists talked about civilization.

So Wilhelm Röpke, who I mentioned to Paul, pretty much understood civilization is Western civilization.

That was his view.

Prolonged symmetry without substance is itself a warning signal.

That was the conclusion the liberal German economist Wilhelm Röpke reached when he wrote during and after World War II about the international crises of the 1930s.

Röpke looked on in horror from his exile as the nations that had been in one world war and would soon be in another kept jaw-jawing at one conference after another without achieving anything while staying on their disastrous course.

That malady has now returned.