Röpke regularly cited the remark of the nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 text Democracy in America warned that, in a democracy, individuals would entrust their private needs to an 'immense tutelary power' that would reduce them to 'a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd'. Writing a decade after World War I, Röpke argued this threat had been realised by the welfare state, which 'takes care of the sort of comfortable stall-feeding of the domesticated masses'. Röpke sought the measure of 'respect for human personality' in the masses' responsibility for their own welfare, remarking that it is hardly progress to treat increasing numbers of people as 'economic minors' under the 'tutelage of the state'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 176