Dacknowledging democracy as the highest political value is, if not foolish, at least negligent. Isn’t Viktor Orbán a democrat too? Didn’t Hitler come to power with the help of democracy? Didn’t Donald Trump win a democratic election? Somehow one would have to manage to protect democracy from being monopolized and thus set limits on the unrestricted democratic power of the people.
Only liberalism can tame democracy by imposing the rule of law. “If liberalism demands democracy,” said economist Wilhelm Röpke, “only on condition that it is equipped with limitations and safeguards that ensure that liberalism is not swallowed up by democracy.” Because the populists fight liberal democracy “to put illiberal democracy in its place”.
Viktor Orbán does not even conceal this when he consciously ennobles his state as an “illiberal democracy”. It is a state that removes or appoints judges as it sees fit, tramples on freedom of the press, and muzzles universities – and the people know they are behind it all.
The historian of ideas Jens Hacke says that Wilhelm Röpke invented the formula of illiberal democracy in the first place. It can be found in a lecture entitled “Epochs of Change” that Röpke gave in Frankfurt on February 8, 1933, a few days after Hitler came to power. This shooting star of German economics, born in 1899, had already been appointed professor at the age of 24. After the seizure of power, he was immediately banned from working.
Röpke did not fall under the hate categories socialist, communist or Jew. Rather, the new rulers regarded him as an implacable enemy of the state because he “fought for liberalism, a market economy and individual freedom without any compromises,” as the historian Götz Aly writes. This liberal-republican resistance is often neglected in historiography and is even falsified into perfidiously equating capitalists and fascists.
Liberalism has become a shooting gallery figure
Röpke, the liberal market economist, emigrated, first to Istanbul and then to Geneva. In 1942 he was expatriated by the Nazis because he was “extremely humanistic and cosmopolitan”. From Switzerland he developed a lively publishing activity, in the early Federal Republic he was a public intellectual. Along with Walter Eucken, Röpke is probably the most important head of the Freiburg School of Social Market Economy, whose economic policy practice was the basis for the rapid increase in prosperity of the people in West Germany after the war.
Reading Röpke’s turn-of-the-epoch lecture (printed in “Confusion and Truth”, 1962) brings plenty of aha moments. Even the title quotes avant la lettre However, Olaf Scholz’ “Zeitenwende” takes away the radical pathos of novelty from the catchphrase. Röpke writes that contemporaries always extended their present forever into the future. Those who don’t want to believe in an end to good business when the economy is booming are the same people who don’t think the end of misery is possible during the crisis. The hysterias are the same.
