Exiles and Half-exiles: Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow and Walter Eucken

Abstract

While acknowledging the possible ‘cognitive advantage’ of all outsiders, Leszek Kolakowski, a philosophy don at the University of Oxford, recently pointed out that most modern intellectuals in exile have chosen their fate (which may induce guilt) often in preference to the ‘half-exile’, innere Emigration. The latter is the condition of man under the ‘unsovereign State’, the ambition of which ‘is to rob its subjects of their historical memory’.2 Both Wilhelm Ropke and Alexander Rustow chose to become refugees in 1933; both felt this as an existential necessity—in Ropke’s case permanently—and both wrote works in exile on a higher intellectual plane than had been possible hitherto. The freedom and polemical sharpness common to their otherwise very different styles stand in contrast to the oblique, elusively ‘value-free’, visibly painstaking terminology a Walter Eucken, the half-exile in Freiburg, would tend to favour under the Third Reich. Without these complementary experiences, the Germans might indeed have been robbed of their historical memory and denied the creative reformulation of principles mistakenly thought by them to be obsolete: a process of prevention and cure in which Wilhelm Ropke, Alexander Rustow and Walter Eucken played the roles, in Ralph Emerson’s sense, of representative men.3