A Measure of Judgments – Wilhelm Röpke’s Methodological Heresy

As early as 1932, Wilhelm Röpke’s social diagnosis of historical liberalism was coupled with a methodological critique of his own discipline, one in which he sought to revisit what seemed to have become settled business: the role of value judgments in social science. His interpretation of the collapse of cultural liberalism included a sense of culpability on the part of social scientists who had not been, in his view, strong enough in their defense of a moral framework within which cultural liberalism could survive. Yet the positivist movement in social science, because of its interpretation of Max Weber’s proscription, had consciously treated value statements as unscientific. Röpke’s arguments regarding the need to “re-orient” the social sciences were anti-positivist, and his correspondence with colleagues reflects that. They were views that he held to the end of his career and are an important part of our understanding of what came to be known as Röpke’s economic humanism.