Conservative Liberalism and Ordo-Liberalism: From Child to Midwife of Crisis in Capitalism and Democracy
This chapter reveals the extent of demise of economics with the Third Reich; the experience of academic isolation, harassment, and fear; the private comments of founding Ordo-liberals in this dark period and the literature they read (like Friedrich Schiller); the misjudgements many of them made and their attempts to draw lessons; and the stimulus to retreat into philosophy and history in the search for meaning. They sought an alternative to ‘vulgar’ liberalism, the failures in the market economy, and the deficiencies in democracy. Character, culture, principles, and rules formed the axes of their thought about a rejuvenated liberalism. The chapter locates the founding thinkers in the beleaguered cultivated bourgeois intelligentsia and its sense of a civilizational crisis of modernity that went back into the nineteenth century; in the disorder that was generated by the First World War and its aftermath, notably fears of communism and fascism; in the hyperinflation of 1923; in the Great Depression; and in brutal anti-Semitism. Prominence is given to Walter Eucken’s remarkable public lecture in 1936 on the struggle of science and his public debate in 1937 with a Nazi economist. The chapter examines how founding Ordo-liberals like Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke were viewed by fellow liberals like Friedrich Hayek, notably the emphasis placed on their strength of character and conviction. Finally, the chapter plots both the extraordinary growth of citations of Ordo-liberalism since the 1950s and its correlation with events; the shift towards seeing it as a cause of crises especially after 2009; and Ordo-liberalism in the context of post-1945 structural changes and debates about patriarchy and the role of women.