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Wilhelm Röpke, 1899-1966.
German economist and Ordo-liberal
Originally from Stade, Hanover, Wilhelm Röpke served briefly and was wounded in the closing year of WWI. He went on to study at Göttingen, Tübingen, and finally in Marburg, where obtained his doctorate in 1921. Röpke entered government service for a couple years before being appointed professor at the University of Jena in 1924. After a year in the United States on a Rockefeller foundation scholarship to analyze agricultural policy, Röpke joined the University of Graz (Austria) in 1926, then, year later, was appointed to his old University of Marburg. Röpke wrote numerous works during this period. In 1931, Röpke served on a Braun commission on unemployment, in which he saw a role for government intervention to save the market economy, his ideas being collected in his 1932 book on the business cycles.
The politically active liberal, Wilhelm Röpke had, in publications under various pseudonyms, warned the German people against the rising Nazis. Röpke lost his post at Marburg in April 1933, soon after the Nazis came to power. Röpke promptly fled to Turkey, where he was appointed professor at the University of Istanbul. It was there that Röpke wrote his Economics in a Free Society, arguably his most influential work In 1937, Röpke moved to Geneva, Switzerland, taking up a position with the Graduate Institute for International Affairs, where he would remain the remainder of his career.
Wilhelm Röpke's wartime writings (particularly his socio-economic trilogy 1942, 1944, 1945) and activities set him up as a leader of German Ordo or "neo-liberalism" movement. Although remaining in his Geneva perch, Röpke served as an advisor to his former student Ludwig Erhard in the post-war German government and is commonly credited with setting up the intellectual foundations for the post-war German "social-market" economy.
Röpke's post-war writing focused more on denunciations of socialist planning and criticizing the Keynesian idea of a fiscal state. In his increasingly conservative later years, Röpke came out in defense of white supremacist policies in South Africa.
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