Foreword

Do likewise for your successors and be happy." Five years later, the French Revolution broke out; its waves have still not subsided, still throw us hither and thither. Gotha itself, famed for its Alma nach de Gotha and its sausages, has been engulfed by the most monstrous tyranny of all times. There could he no greater distance between the honest happiness of the document quoted and the spirit of this book. We may hope, of course, that the German language as written in 1957 would still be intelligible to a burgher of Gotha in 1784. But what, except dumfounded horror, would he his reaction if he were to become acquainted with our world of today-a world shaken by tremen dous shocks and menaced by unimaginable disasters, the prey of anxiety, a world adrift and deeply unhappy? The science of economics had no doubt come to the notice of the erudite in Gotha, thanks to Adam Smith's work, published a few years earlier. But it would seem as incomprehensible as all the rest to our burgher that a representative of that science should be writ ing a book such as this. Our own contemporaries will comprehend it all the better, in so far as they understand their own situation and the problems of their epoch. To further such understanding is the purpose of this hook, as it was the aim of its predecessors. This volume is, however, more than its predecessors were, a book full of apprehension, bitterness, anger, and even contempt for the worst features of our age. This is not a sign of the author's growing gloom, but of the progressive deterioration of the crisis in which we live. It is also a book which takes the reader up and down many flights of stairs, through many stories, into many rooms, some light, some dark, into turrets and corners-but that is perhaps the least reproach to be leveled against the author.

What other thoughts I wish to place at the head of this book, I entrust to the French tongue, once more claiming its place as the lingua franca of Europe. I could not express these thoughts better than my friend Rene Gillouin has done in his book L'homme moderne, bourreau de lui-meme (Paris, 1951): "Ainsi nous sommes tous entraines dans un courant qui est devenu un torrent, dans un torrent qui est devenu une cataracte, et contre lequel, tant que durera Ie regne des masses falsifiees, vulgarisees, barbarisees, il serait aussi insense de Iutter que de pretendre remonter Ie Niagara ala nage. Mais il n'est pas toujours impossible de s'en garer ou de s'en degager, et alors de se retirer dans ce 'lieu ecarte,' dont parle Ie Misanthrope pour y cultiver, dans la solitude ou dans une inti mite choisie, loin des propagandes grossieres et de leurs mensonges illfames, laverite, la purete, l'authenticite. Que des secessions de ce genre se multiplient, qu'elles se groupent, qu'elles se federent, elles ne tarderont pas a polariser un nombre immense d'esprits droits et de bonnes volontes sinceres, qui ont pris Ie siecle en hor reur, mais qui ne savent ni it. qui oi it. quoi se vouer. Ainsi pour raient se constituer des centres de resistance inviolables, des equipes de fabricants d'arches en vue du pro chain Deluge, des groupes de reconstructeurs pour Ie lendemain. de la catastrophe ineluctable."

WILHELM ROPKE Geneva August, 1957 PREFACE TO THE ENGLIS:U-LANGUAGE EDITION In Dante's time, scholars were, at least in one respect, better off than they are today. They all wrote their books in the same language, namely Latin, and thus did not have to worry about translations. Otherwise, one might surmise that Dante would have reserved to scholars an especially gruesome spoit in his Inferno: to punish them for their vanity-a failing reputedly not altogether alien to them they would be made to· read translations of their own works into languages with which they were familiar. That this is, as a rule, indeed torture is well known to anyone who has had the experience. This is the image by which I seek to give adequate expression to the gratitude lowe Mrs. Elizabeth Henderson for the skill and de votion she has brought to the translation of this book, together with her fine feeling for the two languages here to be transposed.