Liberty outside the West

Abstract

I wish of course to thank the Hayek Society for the great honour it has bestowed on me. Imagine my surprise to get a call from Gerhard Schwarz with the news, and to find yself still improbably in my mind associated with an august gallery of previous Hayek medal recipients. I am of course proud to receive an award named after someone so central to my mental evolution, my Weltanschaung. But I am equally proud to re ceive it here in Freiburg, the cradle of the German Ordoliberal and Social Market Economy tradition I first became acquainted with twenty years ago. That happened via the law of unintended consequences. I was a graduate student in Germany in das Jahr der Wende-, I was curious about this term Ordnungspolitik I kept coming across in the FAZ; I wanted to learn more about Erhard and his meaning of social market economy. That led me to Eucken, Bohm and Ropke. They shaped my world-view; it was through them not the other way round that I read Hayek, Smith and Hume carefully. And it was this ensemble that moulded my thinking on classical liberalis and international economic order, my central intellectual preoccupation in the last two decades. Let me also take this most appropriate occasion to acknowledge debts to those still living and working in the ordoliberal and social-market-economy tradition: Hans Will gerodt, who guided me in the ways of his uncle Wilhelm Ropke during long chats in his office at the Institut fur Wirtschaftspolitik in Cologne; Christian Watrin, my Betreuer during a year on a Humboldt Fellowship at the Institut; Alfred Schuller, for generously associating me with Ordo Jahrbuch and bringing me to Marburg on two occasions; Vik tor Vanberg, who made me keenly aware of the links between Hayek, Buchanan and the Freiburg School, and made me understand Hayek better; and Gerhard Schwarz, for pub lishing me in the NZZ and inviting me to one nourishing Progress Foundation seminar in Ticino.