The Cult of the Colossal and Industrial Strength

Wilhelm Röpke warned us 80 years ago about a threat that would only grow after his death. He saw that Nietzsche and other philosophers of the 19th century almost worshiped size. They believed that scale was a good in itself and they pedestalized it. Whether glorifying powerful states or leaning into the depersonalized aesthetic, the intellectuals of the 19th century wanted grand scale and large physical size in almost every part of life. While the philosophers of the 19th century were living in a beautiful human-sized world allowed by the freedom-promoting philosophers of the 18th century, they planted the seeds for the 20th century’s embrace of scale in every aspect of life. The natural climax of the industrial revolution was thought to be an ever-increasing scale and ever-distinguishing division of labor. Empires were still growing, and continental philosophers provided the intellectual justification to do so. Röpke thought that this idolization of size for itself was dangerous spiritually, but also recognized how it could lead to impractical outcomes in governance and business.

Röpke saw both imperialism and the beginnings of the growth of bureaucracy that would define the rest of the 20th century. While most international imperialism has depleted since Röpke wrote, the bureaucracy that he witnessed in western countries has only grown since he wrote about it. He recognized the incentive of the state to increase, but thought that the 20th century presented an even deeper problem. Both the Nazis and the socialists made big government central to their regimes as an extension of the 19th century philosophers that Röpke was so skeptical of. In both systems, the power of the state was believed to be the center of both safety and societal renewal. People in the grips of the great depression followed the philosophers of the 19th century to their natural conclusion and demanded a government that comprehensively dealt with their most fundamental problems. Röpke believed that the philosophical emphasis on scale led people to hand over too much power to a state that could not sustainably deliver the outcomes it promised. …