Wilhelm Röpke

Wilhelm Röpke was born in Germany in 1899, the son of a rural doctor, in a devout Protestant family. From 1917 he studied law and economics at the universities of Göttingen, Tübingen and Marburg, and in 1922 he became a professor at the University of Jena, then the youngest professor in Germany. Because he opposed the National Socialist regime, he left Germany with his family in 1933 and taught at the University of Istanbul until 1937, when he moved to the Graduate Institute in Geneva, where he lived for the rest of his life. In books such as The Social Crisis of Our Time (1950), he argued for a free market economy set within a framework of law, competition and basic social security, and warned that free markets can carry social and spiritual costs. With economists such as Walter Eucken and Alexander Rüstow, he developed ideas, often called ordoliberalism, that Ludwig Erhard put into practice in West Germany after the Second World War, contributing to its 'economic miracle'. He was president of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1961–1962. He died in Geneva in 1966.

Wilhelm Röpke is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised by devout Protestant parents; his economic thought is congruent with Catholic social teaching. Source: Wikipedia