Wilhelm Röpke, Review of The Clash of Progress and Security, by Allan G. B. Fisher (1937)

Wilhelm Röpke’s book review presents Fisher’s argument as an important diagnosis of the conflict between economic progress and producers’ desire for security. Its structure moves from an approving reconstruction of Fisher’s thesis to qualifications concerning entrepreneurial initiative, cyclical fluctuations, liberalism, and socialism. Röpke’s central concern is how changes beneficial to society become destructive when established interests obstruct the reallocation of productive resources. He accepts Fisher’s diagnosis while disputing some of its implications: the remedy, he argues, is institutional reform that restores effective competition, not the abandonment of capitalism.

Röpke begins by suggesting that the book’s modest title conceals its significance. His four-part reconstruction defines progress as increasing satisfaction of wants through continuous changes in production, driven by changing tastes and techniques. Those changes impose losses and adjustment costs on particular producers, whose resistance brings sectional interests into conflict with the common interest.

Consequently, there is in our economic system (or better, in any highly differentiated economic system) an inherent disharmony between the common interest and the sectional interests of the different producers.

The parenthetical qualification matters: Röpke locates this conflict in differentiated economic organization generally, rather than treating it as peculiar to capitalism. He also makes it the starting point of liberal economics. Invoking Wicksteed, he rejects the caricature of liberal economists as believers in spontaneous harmony: competition is necessary precisely because private producer interests do not automatically serve society.

Fisher’s argument, as Röpke reconstructs it, then explains how frustrated adjustment converts potential abundance into unemployment and unused capacity. When demand and technology change without corresponding changes in production, progress itself appears responsible for deprivation.

Economic progress has, then, been frustrated and, what is more, has become the cause of poverty, misery, disappointment and discomfort.

Röpke interprets slogans about poverty amid plenty through this failure of adjustment. Technical achievement alone cannot secure prosperity; the economy must transfer productive agents toward new uses. The contemporary danger is that both the pace of change and resistance to it have intensified. Fisher therefore ends with practical proposals and a warning about capitalism’s future. Röpke does not enumerate those proposals, but praises the book’s clarity, competence, and intellectual courage. He explicitly acknowledges that the opening reconstruction is his own version of Fisher’s argument, distinguishing sympathetic interpretation from direct exposition.

His reservations first concern the compression of difficult subjects. Agriculture requires closer attention to demand elasticity for more refined products, while the market for academic professions also deserves fuller treatment. The deeper objection concerns Fisher’s apparent grouping of different forms of resistance:

The rigidity of our economic system, brought about by the muzzling of competition, is really bad enough, but is it quite just to treat the resistance to change of vested interests on the same footing with the timid resistance of newcomers?

This distinction separates entrenched obstruction from hesitation under adverse conditions. New investment may be discouraged by depression and disrupted financial arrangements without demonstrating that capitalism has lost its capacity for innovation. Röpke consequently cautions against generalizing from depression-era behaviour to an enduring entrepreneurial sluggishness. He also doubts that slow structural adjustment should be treated as a major cause of cyclical fluctuations, although he allows that it may greatly contribute to and aggravate them. His constructive concession is that cycle theorists should examine “horizontal” misdirections: inappropriate allocations within consumption-goods or capital-goods production, not merely difficulties between those spheres.

The review next turns from economic diagnosis to the interpretation of liberalism. Röpke shares Fisher’s insistence that liberals investigate why their cause has lost support instead of merely lamenting its decline. He nevertheless denies that orthodox economics overlooked the conflict between social and sectional interests. Its defence of undistorted competition was intended to overcome precisely that conflict.

Liberalism, indeed, if it has been worthy of this name, has always been a fight against the “capitalists” in order to guarantee the functioning of the economic system for the sake of the communal interest.

Here Röpke distinguishes a competitive economic order from the interests of those who possess capital. Liberal economists appear as independent, often isolated critics of business privilege. His reference to Hutt’s Economists and the Public reinforces the distinction between economic reasoning and organized interests. Fisher’s criticism of producer resistance thus places him close to the liberal tradition, even where his conclusions seem to depart from it.

The final discussion addresses Fisher’s “Challenge to Capitalism.” Röpke concedes that obstructive capitalists strengthen socialism’s appeal and that threats of abandoning capitalism might encourage responsibility. But he rejects socialism as a solution to resistance against change. Administrative institutions, he argues, also resist adjustment; more fundamentally, socialism might reduce the conflict by suppressing the technological dynamism that makes adjustment necessary. He supports this prediction with a footnote citing Ciocca’s observations of Soviet machinery becoming obsolete, though the review does not develop a systematic comparison.

Röpke’s conclusion preserves Fisher’s problem while redirecting its solution. Progress becomes beneficial when the institutional framework permits competition to break down resistance to change. His closing allowance for realistic modifications and concessions qualifies this prescription: the defence of competition requires workable institutional arrangements, not simply an abstract declaration of principle. The review’s significance lies in that combination of agreement and correction—a strong endorsement of structural adaptation as an economic problem, coupled with a defence of liberalism against both producer privilege and socialist alternatives.