<blockquote>'..Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values.'
- Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy -
The Social Framework of the Free Market, (
pdf,) page 104</blockquote>
'The economic function of private ownership tends to be obstinately underestimated, and even more so is its moral and sociological significance for a free society .. It is, again, private ownership which principally distinguishes a nonproletarian form of life from a proletarian one.'<blockquote>'The economic function of private ownership tends to be obstinately underestimated, and even more so is its moral and sociological significance for a free society. The reason is, no doubt, that the ethical universe in which ownership has its place is hard for social rationalism even to understand, let alone to find congenial. And since social rationalism is in ascendancy everywhere, it is not surprising that the institution of ownership has been badly shaken. Even discussions on questions concerning the management of firms are often conducted in terms which suggest that the owner has followed the consumer and the taxpayer into the limbo of "forgotten men." The true role of ownership can be appreciated only if we look upon it as representative of something far beyond what is visible and measurable. Ownership illustrates the fact that the market economy is a form of economic order belonging to a particular philosophy of life and to a particular social and moral universe. This we now have to define, and in so doing the word "bourgeois"* imposes itself, however much mass public opinion (especially of the intellectual masses) may, after a century of deformation by Marxist propaganda, dislike this designation or find it ridiculous.
In all honesty, we have to admit that the market economy has a bourgeois foundation. This needs to be stressed all the more because the romantic and socialist reaction against everything bourgeois has, for generations past, been astonishingly successful in turning this concept into a parody of itself from which it is very difficult to get away. The market economy, and with it social and political freedom, can thrive only as a part and under the protection of a bourgeois system. This implies the existence of a society in which certain fundamentals are respected and color the whole network of social relationships: individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based on ownership, prudence and daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for planning one's own life, proper coherence with the community, family feeling, a sense of tradition and the succession of generations combined with an open-minded view of the present and the future, proper tension between individual and community, firm moral discipline, respect for the value of money, the courage to grapple on one's own with life and its uncertainties, a sense of the natural order of things, and a firm scale of values. Whoever turns up his nose at these things or suspects them of being "reactionary" may in all seriousness be asked what scale of values and what ideals he intends to defend against Communism without having to borrow from it.
To say that the market economy belongs to a basically bourgeois total order implies that it presupposes a society which is the opposite of proletarianized society, in the wide and pregnant sense which it is my continual endeavor to explain, and also the opposite of mass society as discussed in the preceding chapter. Independence, ownership, individual reserves, saving, the sense of responsibility, rational planning of one's own life–all that is alien, if not repulsive, to proletarianized mass society. Yet precisely that is the condition of a society which cherishes its liberty. We have arrived at a point where we are simply forced to recognize that here is the true watershed between social philosophies and that everyone of us must choose for himself, knowing that the choice is between irreconcilable alternatives and that the destiny of our society is at stake.
Once we have recognized this necessity of a fundamental choice, we must apply it in practice and draw the conclusions in all fields. It may come as a shock to many of us to realize how much we have already submitted to the habits of thought of an essentially unbourgeois world. This is true, not least, of economists, who like to think in terms of money flows and income flows and who are so fascinated by the mathematical elegance of fashionable macroeconomic models, by the problems of moving aggregates, by the seductions of grandiose projects for balanced growth, by the dynamizing effects of advertising or consumer credit, by the merits of "functional" public finance, or by the glamor of progress surrounding giant concerns–who are so fascinated by all this, I repeat that they forget to consider the implications for the values and institutions of the bourgeois world, for or against which we have to decide. It is no accident that Keynes–and nobody is more responsible for this tendency among economists than he–has reaped fame and admiration for his equally banal and cynical observation that "in the long run, we are all dead." And yet it should have been obvious that this remark is of the same decidedly unbourgeois spirit as the motto of the
ancien regime: Apres nous Ie deluge. It reveals an utterly unbourgeois unconcern for the future, which has become the mark of a certain style of modern economic policy and inveigles us into regarding it as a virtue to contract debts and as foolishness to save.
A most instructive example is the modern attitude toward an institution whose extraordinary development has caused it to become a much-discussed problem. I have in mind installment buying, or consumer credit. In its present form as a mass habit and in its extreme extent, it is certainly a conspicuous expression of an "unbourgeois" way of life. It is significant, however, that this view and the misgivings deriving from it are hardly listened to nowadays, let alone accepted. It is not, as we are often told, mere "bourgeois" prejudice but the lesson of millennial experience and consonant with man's nature and dignity and with the conditions of a sound society to regard it as an essential part of a reasonable and responsible way of life not to live from hand to mouth, to restrain impatience, self-indulgence, and improvidence alike, to think of the morrow, not to live beyond one's means, to provide for the vicissitudes of life, to try to balance income and expenditure, and to live one's life as a consistent and coherent whole extending beyond death to one's descendants rather than as a series of brief moments of enjoyment followed by the headaches of the morning after. To depart conspicuously from these precepts has always and everywhere been censured by sound societies as shiftless, spendthrift, and disreputable and has carried the odium of living as a parasite, of being incompetent and irresponsible. Even so happy-go-lucky a man as Horace was of one mind on this subject with Dickens' Mr. Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
Installment buying as a mass habit practiced with increasing carelessness is contrary to the standards of the bourgeois world in which the market economy must be rooted, and jeopardizes it. It is, at the same time, an indicator of how much of the humus of the bourgeois existence and way of life has already been washed away by social erosion, as well as an infallible measure of proletarianization, not in the sense of the material standard of living but of a style of life and moral attitude. The representatives of this style of life and moral attitude have lost their roots and steadfastness; they no longer rest secure within themselves; they have, as it were, been removed from the social fabric of family and the succession of generations. They suffer, unconsciously, from inner non-fulfillment, their life as a whole is stunted, they lack the genuine and essentially non-material conditions of simple human happiness. Their existence is empty, and they try to fill this emptiness somehow. One way to escape this tantalizing emptiness is, as we have seen, intoxication with political and social ideologies, passions, and myths, and this is where Communism still finds its greatest opportunity. Another way is to chase after material gratifications, and the place of ideologies is then taken by motor scooters, television sets, by quickly acquired but unpaid-for dresses-in other words, by the flight into unabashed, immediate, and unrestrained enjoyment. To the extent that such enjoyment is balanced not only by corresponding work but also by a reasonable plan of life, saving and provision for the future, and by the non-material values of habits and attitudes transcending the moment's enjoyment, to that extent the emptiness, and with it the "unbourgeois" distress, is, in fact, overcome. But unless this is the case, enjoyment remains a deceptive method. of filling the void and is no cure.
The incomprehension, and even hostility, with which such reflections are usually met nowadays is one more proof of the predominance of social rationalism, with all its variants and offshoots, and of the implied threat to the foundations of the market economy. One of these offshoots is the ideal of earning a maximum amount of money in a minimum of working time and then finding an outlet in maximum consumption, facilitated by installment buying, of the standardized merchandise of modern mass production.
Homo sapiens consumens loses sight of everything that goes to make up human happiness apart from money income and its transformation into goods. Two of the important factors that count in this context are how people work and how they spend their life outside work. Do people regard the whole of the working part of their life as a liability, or can they extract some satisfaction from it? And how do they live outside work, what do they do, what do they think, what part have they in natural, human existence? It is a false anthropology, one that lacks wisdom, misunderstands man, and distorts the concept of man, if it blinds us to the danger that material prosperity may cause the level of simple happiness not to rise but to fall because the two abovementioned vital factors are in an unsatisfactory condition. Such anthropology also prevents us from recognizing the true nature of proletarianism and the true task of social policy.
It is, for instance, a superficial and purely materialist view of proletarianism to believe complacently that in the industrialized countries of the West the proletarians are becoming extinct like the dodo simply because of a shorter working week and higher wages, wider consumption, more effective legal protection of labor and more generous social services, and because of other achievements of current social policy. It is true that the proletariat, as understood by this kind of social rationalism, is receding. But there remains the question of whether, concurrently with this satisfactory development and perhaps because of it, ever wider classes are not engulfed in proletarianism as understood in a much more subtle sense, in the sense, that is, of a social humanism using other criteria which are really decisive for the happiness of man and the health of society. The criteria I have in mind are those which we know well already, the criteria beyond the market, beyond money incomes and their consumption. Only in the light of those criteria can we assess the tasks of genuine social policy, which I advocated fifteen years ago in my book on
The Social Crisis of Our Time and for which Alexander Rüstow has recently coined the felicitous term of "vital policy."
The circle of our argument closes. It is, again, private ownership which principally distinguishes a nonproletarian form of life from a proletarian one. Once this is recognized, the social rationalism of our time has really been left behind. We shall see in a later chapter how direct and short a road leads from here to the great problem of our era's constant inflationary pressure, which has developed into a danger to the market economy plain for all to see.'
- Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy -
The Social Framework of the Free Market, (
pdf,) page(s) 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 and 103
<font size="-1">* The word "bourgeois" is here used to correspond to the German word
bürgerlich, in a completely non-pejorative and non-political sense. As will be seen from the context, the word is used to designate a particular way of life and set of valnes.</font></blockquote>
'..the cult of the standard of life must end up in disillusionment and eventual repugnance.'<blockquote>'Economism, materialism, and utilitarianism have in our time merged into a cult of productivity, material expansion, and the standard of living. This cult proves once again the evil nature of the absolute, the unlimited, and the excessive. Not too long ago, Andre Siegfried recalled Pascal's dictum that man's dignity resided in thought, and Siegfried added that although this had been true for three thousand years and was still valid for a small European elite, the real opinion of our age was quite different. It is that man's dignity resides in the standard of living. No astute observer can fail to note that this opinion has developed into a cult, though not many people would, perhaps, now speak as frankly as C. W. Eliot, for many years President of Harvard University, who, in a commemoration address in 1909, enounced the astonishing sentence: "The Religion of the Future should concern itself with the needs of the present, with public baths, play grounds, wider and cleaner streets and better dwellings."
This cult of the standard of living scarcely needs further definition after what we have already said. It is a disorder of spiritual perception of almost pathological nature, a misjudgment of the true scale of vital values, a degradation of man not tolerable for long. It is, at the same time, very dangerous. It will, eventually, increase rather than diminish what Freud calls the discontents of civilization. The devotee of this cult is forced into a physically and psychologically ruinous and unending race with the other fellow's standard of life–keeping up with the Joneses, as they say in America–and with the income necessary for this purpose. If we stake everything on this one card and forget what really matters, freedom above all, we sacrifice more to the idol than is right, so that, if once the material standard of living should recede by an inch or fail to rise at the rate the cult demands, we remain politically and morally disarmed and baffled. We are deprived of firmness, resistance, and valor in today's world struggle, where more than the standard of life (though it, too) is at stake; we become hesitant and cowardly, until it may be too late to realize that exclusive concentration on the standard of living can lose us both that standard and freedom as well. This road to happiness is bound to lead to a dead end sooner or later. As we approach the limits of reasonable consumption, the cult of the standard of life must end up in disillusionment and eventual repugnance. Even now we are told by Riesman and other American sociologists that the mass of consumers is becoming so blase that the most spectacular advertising effort can hardly break through. Color television, the second car in the family, the television screen in the private swimming pool-all right, but what then? Fortunately, the moment seems near when people begin to rediscover the charms of books and music, of gardening and the upbringing of their children.'
- Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy -
The Social Framework of the Free Market, (
pdf,) page 109 and 110