Frank Albert Fetter’s Review of Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (1943)

Frank Albert Fetter’s review presents Wilhelm Röpke’s book as a defense of economic freedom against both concentrated private power and collectivist planning. Its movement is evaluative as well as explanatory: Fetter welcomes Röpke’s liberal commitment, questions the clarity of his diagnosis, identifies its central economic argument, and endorses its humane purposes while qualifying its historical idealization. The review begins by locating the book within an increasingly inhospitable intellectual climate:

Of late, economic liberals in the truer sense, striving to preserve and to enlarge the range of individual freedom in economic affairs, have become fewer, and their voices sound fainter in the din of the modern mercantilism.

“True” liberalism here means enlarging individual economic freedom, not simply defending existing business arrangements. Fetter introduces Röpke as a refugee from Germany teaching in Geneva, whose scholarly thoroughness accompanies an evangelical commitment to this cause. He also records Röpke’s description of the book as a preliminary investigation requiring further years of work. That modest claim matters because Fetter finds the social crisis itself difficult to isolate amid the book’s abundant quotations, analogies, and terminology.

The crisis, in Fetter’s account, is not primarily the immediate European political catastrophe. Röpke’s discussion remains strikingly aloof from the war and treats the United States of the 1920s as an especially advanced instance of social degeneration. Its diagnosis joins spiritual and moral deterioration to political, sociological, and economic changes; Fetter reads the degeneration of economic organization as the underlying source of the other disorders.

His most important conceptual clarification concerns Vermassung. A suggested translation describes reduction to an amorphous mass, but Fetter argues that Röpke actually depicts a transformation of social structure, rather than structure’s disappearance. Decentralized ownership gives way to a new industrial feudalism. The vocabulary of disintegration thus points toward a definite organization of dependence:

The great evil he sees is that the earlier decentralized capitalism of small independent ownership and enterprise, in agriculture, industry, and commerce, is being rapidly displaced over wide areas by a highly centralized business organization in which the masses of the nation are reduced to the status of employees and dependents of huge aggregations of capital.

The passage makes ownership and independence, rather than material output alone, the criteria of a healthy economy. Concentration threatens freedom by converting proprietors into dependents. Fetter connects this argument with Justice Brandeis’s criticism of business bigness, while observing that Röpke’s advocacy of small enterprise goes further than that of prominent American liberal opponents of monopoly.

The proposed remedy follows from this distinction between capitalism’s decentralized possibilities and its concentrated forms:

Equally opposed to the extreme of laissez faire liberalism and to collectivism or bureaucratic national planning, the author pleads for "the third way." He would seek the better society by a constructive liberalism.

Fetter reports that the book’s latter half turns to practical action: specific, incremental measures to recover lost independence and extend economic freedom to ordinary people. He does not enumerate those measures, so the review establishes the direction of reform more clearly than its institutional details.

Its closing judgment remains sympathetic but qualified. Röpke’s preference for the eighteenth century over the nineteenth suggests romanticism, and his case may undervalue improved technology. Yet Fetter regards the governing standard—human worth above physical possessions—as the wisdom of a genuine welfare economist. The review’s enduring significance lies in this conception of liberalism: freedom requires attention to the distribution of economic independence, not merely opposition to state planning or approval of private accumulation.