The author, who held chairs in economics at several German universities, was dismissed in 1933 for opposing the advent of Hitler. More than most anti-Nazi German writers, he is aware of the moral and historical responsibility of the German people for the crimes of Nazism. He puts forward a plan to salvage Germany for western civilization, based in part on a reversal of the Bismarckian policy of enforcing Prussian hegemony. Toward Soviet Russia he evinces serious apprehensions.