Karl Pribram’s Review of Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (1944)

Karl Pribram’s review examines Wilhelm Röpke’s proposed reconstruction of the capitalist order, balancing admiration for its intellectual breadth against doubts about its historical explanation and practical applicability. Pribram presents the book’s structure as a movement from diagnosis to prescription: an extensive account of the ideological, social, and economic origins of contemporary crisis prepares the program of action in its second part. The organizing proposal is Röpke’s “third way,” a substantial reform of capitalism intended to provide an alternative to socialism. Pribram recognizes both the ambition of this undertaking and the scholarship supporting it, but asks whether its historical premises and preferred social model can withstand the transformations of wartime Europe.

Röpke’s diagnosis begins with the political and economic revolutions whose origins he traces to the Renaissance and whose consequences matured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rejecting historical materialism, he treats ideas as the principal forces of historical change. In Pribram’s account, the political revolution dismantled society’s differentiated structure, leaving an aggregation of individuals vulnerable to mass civilization, nihilism, and collectivism. Economic liberalism extended this disintegration by granting the competitive market autonomy without adequately considering the restraints needed to preserve social cohesion.

Particularly the cult of “bigness” or “megalolatry” is emphasized by Röpke as an outstanding characteristic of present-day ideology.

This formulation connects Röpke’s criticism of economic organization to a broader criticism of modern culture. Pribram explains that Röpke associates the preference for scale with nationalism, imperialism, socialism, monopoly capitalism, and etatism, while also linking it to positivism, relativism, and determinism. The conceptual move is to treat apparently divergent institutions and philosophies as expressions of a shared loss of moral orientation. Capitalist concentration and socialist collectivism consequently appear as related manifestations of the crisis, rather than exhaustive alternatives between which society must choose.

Yet Röpke’s criticism of unrestricted competition does not entail abandoning competitive organization. Pribram identifies the relationship between economic arrangements and political freedom as a central argument of the book. Röpke rejects the socialist claim that government-controlled production can coexist with individual liberty. His contrast between the bailiff’s judgment under competition and the executioner’s under socialism gives the distinction a deliberately stark form:

Political autonomy as realized in a democracy, he argues, cannot exist except under a competitive order.

The proposed reform therefore seeks to retain competition while controlling its socially destructive tendencies. Röpke also contests the supposed inevitability of capitalism’s transformation into socialism. His “third way” depends on the possibility of purposeful institutional reconstruction: society need not accept either unqualified market autonomy or comprehensive state direction.

Pribram’s principal reservation concerns the historical adequacy of this diagnosis. Although Röpke draws mainly on European experience, his account gives no substantial consideration to Nazi philosophy or to the revolutionary transformation of Germany and the wider continent. Pribram notes that the book was written in 1941, at the height of National Socialist power. Nevertheless, it treats the regime and the global war as episodes within a longer history, implicitly anticipating a relatively rapid return to something resembling the prewar order.

The question may be raised whether Röpke's analysis will still be applicable to the conditions of post-war Europe.

This question challenges the connection between the book’s explanatory framework and its reform program. If war and totalitarian rule have shattered the conditions of competitive capitalism, a prescription based on their temporary interruption may misjudge the task of reconstruction. Pribram also doubts that the rise and successes of National Socialism can be sufficiently explained through the eighteenth-century revolutions. Similarly, he rejects a direct causal connection between economic liberalism and rationalism, on one side, and the Bolshevik revolution and Russian developments, on the other. His objection is not to historical interpretation itself, but to generalizations that compress distinct transformations into a single ideological genealogy.

A further difficulty lies in Röpke’s voluntarism. As Pribram reads him, peoples at the beginning of the revolutions appear to have possessed the freedom to limit technological development, prevent mass production, and avoid the social consequences he condemns. This emphasis on deliberate choice sits uneasily beside Röpke’s suggestion that social ideas develop cyclically and that capitalism’s ideology may therefore yield to one more favorable to an organized society. Pribram exposes a tension between historical agency and the patterned succession invoked to support hopes for reform.

The practical program supplies a recognizable institutional model:

The well-organized society, the main features of which are outlined in Röpke's program of action, corresponds approximately to the political and economic system developed in Switzerland with its strong, independent and well educated peasantry, its stock of highly trained artisans and small merchants, its decentralized industry.

This model informs Röpke’s treatment of welfare, the regulation of competition, resistance to monopoly, and international trade. Pribram ends by questioning where, beyond Switzerland and perhaps some Scandinavian countries, nations possess both the willingness and the capacity to adopt it. The review thus locates the book’s importance in its attempt to reconcile competition with social cohesion and political liberty, while withholding confidence in its historical explanation and wider feasibility. Its decisive test is whether an attractive decentralized order can become a practicable response to the societies emerging from war.