Wilhelm Röpke seems to have thought about death while writing A humane economy, which was his last book. He wrote at the beginning of the book that he was a “contemporary” of the 20th century but “cannot hope to see its end.” He seems to have wanted his readers to also think about their own deaths. While those familiar with Röpke's thought will be familiar with his emphasis on the moral conditions of the market, some may not have noticed the recurring theme of mortality A humane economy. Röpke did not advocate a persistent, pathological view of mortality. This short essay doesn't argue anything like that either. Instead, I just want to point out something that may have been missed by readers of Röpke's book so far, and suggest that Röpke thinks it deserves attention.
When it first appeared in 1958, A humane economy was published under the title Jennets of supply and demand (Beyond supply and demand). The necessary conditions for maintaining the free market, Röpke argued, lay “beyond supply and demand.” He called those things beyond supply and demand that make life worth living the “vital things”. You can't buy everything we need to live with money: “People don't just live from the radio, the car and the refrigerator, but from the whole unsaleable world beyond the market and sales figures, the world of dignity, beauty, Poetry, grace, chivalry.”, love and friendship, the world of community, diversity of life, freedom and fullness of personality.” Without property rights, the rule of law and free prices, there is no free enterprise, but these institutional features of the free market depend on something deeper – a cultural commitment to certain vital things that are more important than prices and that cannot themselves have a price.
The book's recurring phrase “vital things” refers to those “that give meaning, dignity, and inner richness to life,” a definition that might make the inclusion of death itself in its list of vital things seem strange. The word “vital” alone makes it strange: death seems necessary for a good life. Why?
The most immediate economic consequence of forgetting death is that it appears to undermine the moral norms that maintain a healthy market. John Maynard Keynes' (in)famous statement that “in the long run we are all dead,” Röpke says, “reveals a completely unbourgeois concern for the future that has become the hallmark of a certain style of modern economic policy and intrigue.” brought to view it as a virtue to go into debt and as folly to save.” Delayed gratification is becoming rare, impatience is the norm.
In contrast, Röpke writes that a healthy society is one in which one strives to “live one's life as a consistent and coherent whole, extending beyond death to one's offspring, rather than a series of brief moments of pleasure.” , which are followed by the headaches of the morning after.” Such a society embodies certain wholesome habits such as “individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based on property, prudence and daring, calculation and saving, responsibility for planning the own life… a sense of tradition and the succession of generations combined.” with an open-minded view of the present and the future, an appropriate tension between the individual and the community, strict moral discipline, respect for the value of money, [and] the courage to deal with life and its uncertainties alone.”
Not a pathological obsession with death, but a cultural awareness of it, seems to be one of the vital things that promotes these wholesome habits. But birth, illness and ultimately death often no longer take place in the places where we live, but in hospitals. Ropke despised “remote cemeteries” as “human garbage heaps… carefully removed from daily life.” Yet in much of the modern West, with smaller families and the modern phenomenon of the nuclear family, many of us experience death in our youth less frequently than most people did in the past. Furthermore, our society protects us from death with various euphemisms (“passed down”) and with various means of sterilizing the torment and suffering of life (“prudently removed” cemeteries).
Röpke therefore turned against what he called the “asymmetry of the market” – that is, against the tendency of market society to allow market forces to flow into areas of life that contain intrinsic goodness and should be free from these forces. The things of life – the things beyond supply and demand – often resist monetary valuation and therefore wither away if not carefully preserved. Proper consideration of the meaning of death seems to be one such point.
Bill Reddinger has been a professor of political science at Regent University since 2010. He previously taught political science at Wheaton College in Illinois and South Texas College. He received his bachelor's degree from Grove City College in Pennsylvania before receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. completed. in political science from Northern Illinois University, where his studies focused on the history of political philosophy and American political thought. Reddinger's contributions can also be found in the OLL reading room.
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