Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ordoliberalism, Ludwig Erhard, and West Germany’s “Economic Basic Law”

2015; Brill; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3224/eris.v2i3.23447

2196-7415

Volker R. Berghahn,

European history and politics

Germany’s Social Market Economy has been in the limelight recently as a variant of modern capitalism, different from the Anglo-American model. Starting from this debate this article goes back to the ideas of the Freiburg School of Economics in the immediate post-1945 period whose representatives, Walter Eucken prominently among them, emerged from the Nazi period with concepts of how to organise a modern industrial economy that they called ‘ordoliberal’. Their writings are then connected, but also contrasted, with the policies of Ludwig Erhard, West Germany’s first economics minister, who, being under many domestic and foreign pressures, adapted the principles of economic management of the Freiburg School to the realities of the 1950s and 1960s. The article is written in the hope of stimulating debate on Germany’s Social Market Economy, past and present.