Neoliberal intellectuals framed the wartime era as a moral and spiritual crisis requiring diagnosis

Evidence

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, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Mont Pèlerin Society origin story and the broader narrative of postwar liberal renewal that runs through this book’s other chapters. — connects to: Neoliberal thinkers worried wartime controls would accustom publics to permanent authoritarianism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 733; The Society diagnosed the era’s crisis as moral-relativist history plus weakened belief in markets — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 142; Neoliberalism’s internal contradictions are displaced onto cultural theaters of cruelty — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 366 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The Society diagnosed the era’s crisis as moral-relativist history plus weakened belief in markets #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 142
• Neoliberal thinkers worried wartime controls would accustom publics to permanent authoritarianism #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 733
• The religious right redefined the post-Cold War era as a cultural war #epitomizes (0.75) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 323
• Neoliberalism’s internal contradictions are displaced onto cultural theaters of cruelty #complicates (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 366