Reflections on Werner Bonefeld's ‘Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism' and the Continuing Importance of the Ideas of Ordoliberalism to Understand Germany's (Contested) Role in Resolving the Eurozone Crisis

Abstract

A historian and a political scientist take issue with Bonefeld's interpretation of ordoliberalism from the viewpoint of our historical knowledge of the Freiburg School. Our major disagreement is with Bonefeld's underlying assumption that the ideas of the Freiburgers on strong state authority were very durable and continued to be so across a divide as great as that of 1945 when a more strictly chronological use of the sources would have shown significant transformations. The earlier quasi proto-fascist ideas of the strong state were replaced with a much more muted role for the state in providing a constitutional framework in which the market forces could develop. It is through this break with their own initial sympathy with Hitler's strong state that the ideas of the Freiburger Ordnungspolitik underwent profound changes to a constitutional state as guarantor of economic stability, and only in this changed form do the ideas of a legal rule-based system of the Freiburger ordoliberals continue to play an important role in understanding Germany's role in resolving the Euro crisis. It is this significant shift, in the ideas of ordoliberals, that is missing in Bonefeld's article.