Wilhelm Ropke's Political Economy, by Samuel Gregg [review] LeamanJeremy 2014 Samuel Gregg’s study of Wilhelm Röpke is an honest and not infrequently critical account of an economist who belonged to the quirky and – outside Germany – virtually unknown group of ‘ordoliberals’ that was most active in the period between the end of the First World War and the early 1960s, i.e. in that cauldron of intellectual reappraisal that generated a number of new approaches to macroeconomic policy in the countries of the developed capitalist world.