Hayek and Röpke framed the working-class masses as uncivilized racial others

Evidence

For Hayek, the revolt of the masses represented the failure of the ‘taming of the savage’. For Röpke, newly proletarianised peasants from the countryside were a culturally alien force and a threat to a civilised society. In language that has since become all too familiar on today’s anti-immigrant right, he complained that ‘the country of Goethe, the Humboldts and even of Nietzsche’ had been ‘swamped by countless millions which came too quickly and in too great numbers to be absorbed culturally’; a ‘nation’, Röpke warned, ‘may beget its own barbarian invaders’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to contemporary critique of anti-immigrant right-wing discourse and to the reading list on Islamophobia; Whyte’s point that this language predates today’s right is a genealogy of reaction. — connects to: Du Bois saw race ideology as a rationalization that divided the exploited working classes — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2189; Racialism pervaded Western consciousness before and beyond capitalism
• SEED: Article angle: tracing the anti-migrant ‘swamping’ rhetoric from German ordoliberalism to today’s right as a continuous genealogy rather than recent invention.

Broader Connections

• Du Bois saw race ideology as a rationalization that divided the exploited working classes #corroborates (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2189
• Racialism pervaded Western consciousness before and beyond capitalism #expands (0.70)