Röpke justified market discipline by the entrepreneur’s shared risk with others

Evidence

In a short piece on the entrepreneur from 1947, Röpke described the entrepreneur as “the node in the enormously complicated pro­cess of the market economy: he receives the impulses that the consumers send to him and translates them into the corresponding type and volume of production.” In an extraordinary meta­phor worth quoting at length, Röpke writes that the entrepreneur sits “at a switchgear into which a thousand currents enter to be sent out again in another direction and another form. The private economic fate of the individual entrepreneur depends on the correct operation of this switchgear … ​and it is precisely this de­pen­ den­cy … ​that offers the best guarantee that he ­will operate the switchgear as conscientiously, zealously, and intelligently as the engineer of a complicated electric locomotive whom we offer the same trust and confidence ­because we know that the fate of the train is, at the same time, also his own.” By living dangerously, the entrepreneur risks the lives of ­others and therein risks his own life. Entrepreneurs, Röpke wrote, are “subordinated to the sovereignty of the market.” — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 770

Categorization

• SEED: The switchgear/engineer metaphor is a vivid device for an essay on how risk was moralized as the price of market legitimacy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The double-move — the entrepreneur risking others’ lives as the very guarantee of conscientiousness — is a dense legitimating logic worth sitting with.