ISI exerpts “The Economy Isn’t Everything” from Wilhelm Roepke’s book, The Humane Economy.
Economists have their typical deformation professionelle, their own occupational disease of the mind. Each of us speaks from personal experience when he admits that he does not find it easy to look beyond the circumscribed field of his own discipline and to acknowledge humbly that the sphere of the market, which it is his profession to explore, neither exhausts nor determines society as a whole. The market is only one section of society. It is a very important section, it is true, but still one whose existence is justifiable and possible only because it is part of a larger whole which concerns not economics but philosophy, history, and theology. We may be forgiven for misquoting Lichtenberg and saying: To know economics only is to know not even that. Man, in the words of the Gospel, does not live by bread alone.
