In the history of economic thought Walter Eucken is mostly known for his impact in establishing the Social Market Economy in post-war Germany. Even though there is a growing interest in his ideas especially from an Austrian and a Constitutional Economics perspective, his influence on the...

Germany's approach to solving the Eurozone crisis is supposedly based on the ideas of Walter Eucken (1891-1950), the founder of ordoliberalism. In this and other contexts, Eucken's work has been described as being in direct opposition to that of John Maynard Keynes. Our paper aims to clarify and...

What is the appropriate role of the state in economic policy-making? This paper shows that Friedrich Hayek, who is often considered a proponent of laissez-faire liberalism, offers three different answers to this problem. First, Hayek argues that the state should provide a legal framework for...

This paper provides, after a contextualizing introduction, the first-time translation of Walter Eucken's presentation during the first session of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, April 1-10, 1947. Eucken was the only scholar based in Germany to attend the conference and took an...

James Buchanan would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2019. This serves as an inspiration to look at the future of public choice and the question of how much normativity public choice can bear. In our analysis we draw parallels between public choice and German ordoliberalism (and its source...

Ordoliberalism and Keynesianism are not exactly known to fit hand in glove. Accordingly, the German economists Walter Eucken, head of the Freiburg school, and Wilhelm Röpke, from his Istanbul and Geneva exiles, were in near perfect agreement in their opposition to the interventionist "full...

The distinct characteristic in James Buchanan's thinking about federalism in contrast to the traditional theory of fiscal federalism is his view about fiscal competition. In this paper, it is demonstrated that this thinking went through three stages. From the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s,...

German policy during the Eurozone crisis supposedly follows an ordoliberal tradition. In this paper, we discuss to what extent this contention holds and to what extent Germany pragmatically responded to different crisis phenomena. A proper analysis of ordoliberal thinking reveals that the...

Ordoliberalism is often accused as being responsible for Germany's policy stance during the Eurozone crisis. Ordoliberalism originates from the so-called Freiburg School of Economics, founded by Walter Eucken during the 1930s at the University of Freiburg, which is in fact in Germany. It is...

This paper contextualizes the early political economy of Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. It argues that the particular urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to preserve and stabilize the disintegrating orders of economy and...