The archive.

Does an elastic banking system necessarily generate business cycles? In this 1929 review of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie, Wilhelm Röpke welcomes a monetary explanation that looks beyond the general price level to credit creation and interest rates, but stops short of endorsing its exclusive claims. Writing as a monetary theorist himself, he asks whether changes in real accumulation can also disturb equilibrium and challenges Hayek’s reliance on automatic market adjustment, particularly in agriculture. His response offers a compact encounter with monetary theory under internal scrutiny: agreement on the importance of commercial-bank credit leaves open both the necessity of recurring fluctuations and the scope for policies to moderate them.

Abolishing private ownership would not settle how much leather should go into shoes or how resources should be divided between agriculture and railways. In this 1934 newspaper article, Wilhelm Röpke shifts the dispute over capitalism from intentions to the practical means of choosing among competing needs. His objection to comprehensive planning grants administrators intelligence and integrity but questions how they could calculate without market valuations. Yet his defence of markets is conditional: purchasing power is unequal, monopoly severs profit from performance, and capitalists themselves may evade competition or shift losses onto society. The article makes a precise distinction available to readers: preserving the coordinating work of prices need not mean endorsing every existing distribution of wealth or excluding public enterprise and redistribution.

An economy can revive without the world economy recovering. This distinction gives Wilhelm Röpke’s 1935 commentary its conditional optimism: renewed private investment offers evidence of market resilience, but national upswings remain vulnerable to monetary instability and barriers to trade. He attributes America’s acceleration to restored entrepreneurial confidence and a retreat from policy experimentation, while warning that cheap credit and gold inflows could turn recovery into another excessive boom. His international perspective also sharpens a concrete domestic criticism: protecting grain prices can harm other farmers by raising feed costs and reducing consumers’ purchasing power. The essay offers a contemporary liberal diagnosis of recovery in progress, asking how self-sustaining investment can be distinguished from state-supported activity—and why prosperity within national borders is not enough.

A farmer can increase output, calculate carefully, and still become poorer. In this two-installment article of 1927–1928, Wilhelm Röpke examines why commercially advanced American agriculture remained vulnerable to debt, falling prices, and costs that resisted adjustment. His regional comparisons challenge easy equations between low yields and backwardness, or large acreage and the disappearance of family farming. The central tension is between individual enterprise and collective outcomes: responses to yesterday’s prices can produce tomorrow’s glut. This gives his criticism of the McNary-Haugen bill a specific edge—higher supported prices, without control of output, risk renewing the surplus they are meant to relieve. Röpke instead presses the case against industrial tariffs, showing how farmers could buy in a protected market while selling at world prices.

Opposition to communism, Röpke warns, need not prevent a state from copying Soviet methods of control. This newspaper article tests that distinction through accounts of Soviet Russia by M. Polányi, W. H. Chamberlin and André Gide. Röpke connects the failures of economic monopoly—poor goods, inadequate food, indifference to consumers—to the suppression of independent judgment. Gide’s disillusionment sharpens his question: why did an artist committed to individual creation expect freedom from collectivist organization? The article makes visible both Röpke’s institutional understanding of liberty and the contested reach of his conclusion: he treats Soviet experience not merely as evidence against one regime, but as grounds for arguing that socialist planning necessarily entails political dictatorship.