Ordoliberalismus als ökonomische Ordnungstheologie

Abstract

The article traces the influence of Lutheran Protestantism on the leading German liberal economic doctrine, Ordoliberalism. The central claim is that Ordoliberalism is the reaction of Weimar’s protestant-bourgeois milieu to its growing feeling of being economically endangered, politically marginalized and religiously majorized. The early formulations of this new economic doctrine start as a sharp polemic against the ‘system of Weimar’, in particular against the German welfare state. Social reform, once the pet-project of the enlightened Protestant middle-class, gave birth to the corporatist Bismarckian welfare state, that turned out to be especially favorable for the Socialist and Catholic unions as well as politically beneficial for the Catholic Center party and Social democracy. The article holds that once we recognize the strong religious impetus behind the ordoliberal doctrine, we can understand its strongly anti-liberal character. And only then we are able to comprehend that Germany’s postwar political economy in essence is an expression of a compromise between social Catholicism and social Protestantism.