Against both the ‘doctrinaire ideology of modern democracy’ and laissez-faire, Röpke upheld an idea of freedom that ‘guarantees the rights of the person, limits the action of the State’ and secures the rights of families, minorities and religious groups. A précis for liberalism, he argues, could be written drawing only on the writings of the Roman statesman Cicero and the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, in whom we find the ‘venerable patrimony of the personalist philosophy’ that was crystallised in the political philosophy of the Catholic Church. The social goal of the Church, Röpke argued, was to dissipate class struggle and rescue the economy from ‘an omnivorous collectivism’ – which was ‘exactly what the representatives of neo-liberalism hold’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 355