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Röpke did not question the good intentions of Cobden and his followers. Nor did he deny that free trade had delivered on its economic promise. The results in terms of increased growth and efficiency were spectacular. While Britain benefited immensely from its embrace of free trade, Röpke also argued that it was "equally true that British free trade was an essential foundation of the world economy such as developed, in all its impressive strength and breadth, and with all its intricate institutions, in the course of the nineteenth century." 

Röpke went on, however, to conclude that that "the underlying social philosophy" associated with the Cobdenite free-trade-leads-to-peace outlook had been exposed by events as insufficiently appreciative of important realities of the human condition. "The dawn of the golden age of peace, and the social philosophy that regarded free trade as the guardian in international concord," Röpke wrote, "seems to us as faded as the paper on which it was printed." Among other things, two world wars in thirty years had illustrated that there are many causes of international conflict that widespread trade had proved unable to neutralize.

For these reasons, Röpke maintained that free traders did not only need to rethink how they made their arguments. They also had to be more modest about what free trade can achieve. Certainly, he stated, "We may still defend as relatively more reasonable than others that the decision as to what individual nations produce or not should be left to free international trade." But the case for free trade, Röpke believed, had to be more aware that nations, national-sovereignty, and the propensity of states to pursue what they regarded as their national interests were facts of life that were not going away anytime soon. Human relations, whether between individuals or countries, were simply more complicated than some nineteenth-century free traders had supposed.

Ropke was in effect making a more "conservative" case for what is typically regarded as a "classical liberal" commitment. The irony is that the outlines of precisely such a case can be found in the writings of important father-figures of the classical liberal tradition.

Cobden was fond of invoking Adam Smith in support of his peace through trade arguments. Many believed that there was clear continuity between the two men's views of nations, trade, the nation, and international affairs. Attention to Smith's writings, however, illustrates the questionable nature of this claim.

In the first place, Smith was skeptical that moral sympathy extended much beyond one's nation. Smith did not argue that our concern for others simply stopped at the border. Smith did, however, believe that our sympathy for others became considerably weaker once it moved beyond national boundaries.

Empathy for humanity as a whole and love of country were not, Smith believed, incompatible. Nonetheless he viewed patriotism as more natural. "The love of our country," Smith stated, "seems not to be derived from the love of mankind. The former sentiment is altogether independent of the latter, and seems sometimes even to dispose us to act inconsistently with it." A person's nation, according to Smith, was more part of his everyday cultural, historical, linguistic, and cultural reality than mankind as a whole. Putting your country's well-being before that of other nations was therefore normal. Smith even regarded fighting and dying for your country as profoundly honorable. The patriot who does so acts, Smith comments, "with the most exact propriety."

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