The book that Wilhelm Röpke published in the midst of the war, The Social Crisis of Our Time, was permeated with this sense of crisis. “There is unanimous agreement,” he wrote, that the current age was distinguished by its “unequalled moral and intellectual de cadence,” “spiritual chaos,” and “boundless relativism.” Röpke, however, preserved some of the optimism that had accompanied the fi rst gathering of revisionary liberals four years before. A “vanguard— perhaps small as yet and by no means very certain of itself” was formulating a “new spiritual development . . . quietly and far from the noise of the great stage of the world where the last act of the old drama is still being played out.” His book was intended as both a diagnosis of the ills affl icting contemporary civilization and a programmatic statement of possible solutions to be implemented in the coming years. Its brisk pace of sales— over 6,000 copies were purchased within German Switzerland alone in the fi rst few weeks after publication, necessitating an immediate second edition— spoke to the war time appetite for didactic assessments of the contemporary social crisis.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 204