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[L]iberalism served in Röpke's lecture as a synonym for the integration of Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian, and Enlightenment ideas, culture, and institutions that, he believed, constituted the civilization of the West. Nazism--and Bolshevism, for that matter--should, Röpke maintained, be recognized as an insurrection against that particular complexion of concepts, expectations, and institutions.

As a distinguished free market economist, Röpke was well aware of the role played by the hyperinflation that had economically undermined and politically radicalized parts of the German middle class in the early 1920s, as well as the Great Depression in propelling the Nazi Party to power. "The present world crisis," he said, "outranges all standards of the past." The economic downturn that began in 1929 had driven Germany to the political abyss by shattering the relative stability that Weimar had attained by 1926.

Röpke, however, was neither an economic determinist nor a philosophical materialist. The political situation in which Germany found itself should not, he claimed, be understood as the country's entry into "a new historical era" of the type predicted by Marxist dialectics.

The deeper cause for many Germans' embrace of the Nazis, in Röpke's view, was the turning of those whom he called "the masses" but also a fair number of professors against very specific values in the name of "Germany's awakening" and "the purification of the German soul." The delicate and sophisticated arrangements of capitalism and liberal constitutionalism, Röpke argued, relied upon some decidedly non-materialist foundations that many Germans had either been persuaded to reject or never really internalized.

Individuality, Liberty, and Reason

One such premise of liberalism to which Röpke's lecture devoted particular attention was every person's individuality. Liberalism, he said, involved a belief in "every individual's human dignity" and "the profound conviction that man must never be degraded into an object." That, Röpke said, was why liberalism rejected the oppression of people because of their race or religion. A coherent conception of tolerance itself was impossible, he noted, without an in-principle affirmation of every individual's inherent dignity--not least because it ruled out treating one's political opponents as "enemies" who belonged to a different group, and who would ultimately have to be reduced to the status of non-citizens or expelled from the body-politic altogether.

It was no coincidence, Röpke argued, that the National Socialists submerged everything into the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community," "folk community," or "racial community"). For the Nazis, what mattered was the group: in their case, the racial collective.

On one level, this was the Nazi alternative to the German Communists' emphasis on one's class above all else. It wasn't for idle reasons that Nazi party members addressed each other as "Comrade." Yet just as Marxism's class-identity obsession pulverized any concern for the individual, so too did the Nazi fixation with race dismiss the concept of each individual person's intrinsic worth as bourgeois prattle.

For Röpke, defense of the individual was tied to two other ideas that liberalism, as he understood it, emphasized. One was the priority of liberty. By liberty, Röpke meant more than "to be free from something." Liberty also involved being "free for something." That "something," he said, was nothing less than "civilization"--"the very air" without which we "cannot breathe."

Liberty in this sense thus went together with what Röpke called a belief in reason. And reason properly understood, for Röpke, far exceeded empirical rationality and utility calculations. Ultimately, reason concerned "the absolute pursuit of truth." If societies wanted to be free, he added, they had "to accept reason as the common denominator." For reason, combined with respect for freedom and each individual's dignity, was indispensable for the liberal constitutionalism and rule of law that inhibited the type of arbitrary power that the Nazis would take to new levels. To violate the rule of law, Röpke underscored, was to behave in an inherently unreasonable manner, not least because it invariably involved choosing to treat individuals as things and to crush their liberty. Therein lay the path to "servilism" and the "total state."

But where did Röpke ultimately locate the roots of these liberal ideas? Significantly, Röpke did not immediately point to the Kantian philosophy that was so influential among German liberal thinkers of his time. Rather, he urged his audience to look, first, to "the Greek and Roman Stoa" (Stoic philosophers), then "Christianity," the subsequent development of "natural law," and finally enlightenment thought--all of which, taken together, rejected "the principle of violence in favor of the principle of reason." From this standpoint, Röpke explained, "Liberalism is at least two thousand years old."

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