German political and economic ideology in the twentieth century and its theological problems: The Lutheran genealogy of ordoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Ordoliberalism is widely considered to be the dominant ideology of the German political elite today and consequently responsible at least in part for its hard ‘austerity’ line during the recent Eurozone crisis. This article presents a genealogy of the main concerns, concepts and problems around which early German ordoliberalism was formed and structured as a political and economic ideology. Early ordoliberalism is shown to be rooted in an interwar Germanophone Lutheran Evangelical tradition of anti-humanist ‘political ethics’. Its specific conceptions of the market, the state, the individual, freedom and duty were developed on a Lutheran Evangelical basis. Analytically, the article considers ideological influences of theology on political and economic theory not so much in terms of consensus and ideational overlap, but rather in terms of shared concerns, concepts and problems across different positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Ordoliberalism
• ideology
• Europe
• economic thought
• religion
• genealogy

JEL Classification:

• A12 relation of economics to other disciplines
• A13 relation of economics to social values
• B29 history of economic thought since 1925: other

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Arne Käthner for providing me with copies of Rüstow’s letters to Röpke and Eucken and Martin Beddeleem for providing me with the minutes of the ‘Liberalism and Christianity’ session of the 1947 Mont Pelerin Society meeting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Troels Krarup http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7239-2221

Additional information

Funding

Gerda Henkel Foundation Postdoctoral Stipend, [grant number AZ 24/V/17].