ABSTRACT
The outbreak of World War II left Wilhelm Röpke astonished but not surprised. For so many years the German economist, who was forced by the Nazi to flee to Turkey and eventually to Switzerland, where he taught at the Institut d’Hautes Etudes Internationales sited in Geneva, had been fearing that the political, economic and moral disintegration of the international community, and Europe in particular, was to produce a war of unprecedented scale.1 He saw the reestablishment of customs; the increasingly invasive interventionism into market economy; the aggressive upsurge of fascist autarkies and populist totalitarianism, though black or red; the progressive loss of competition within and outside the national borders as the most alarming symptoms of a crisis doomed to burst violently and overwhelm Western civilization.
