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The second chapter shows that, in the eyes of ordoliberals, power is the source of an epistemological problem. Eucken tried to acquire a scientific understanding of the driving forces underlying the economic order, what he called the actual economic reality. His ambition rested on a method to escape the given and immediate aspects of the reality, which seemed contaminated by vested interests. Thus, Eucken updated the old German methodological quarrel (Methodenstreit). In order to resolve the great antinomy between theory and history, Eucken suggested articulating these two approaches by means of his theory of orders. Eucken aimed at applying theoretical analysis to the uses and abuses of power in the economy but without falling under the influence of the expression of vested interests.

This chapter reveals the extent of demise of economics with the Third Reich; the experience of academic isolation, harassment, and fear; the private comments of founding Ordo-liberals in this dark period and the literature they read (like Friedrich Schiller); the misjudgements many of them made and their attempts to draw lessons; and the stimulus to retreat into philosophy and history in the search for meaning. They sought an alternative to ‘vulgar’ liberalism, the failures in the market economy, and the deficiencies in democracy. Character, culture, principles, and rules formed the axes of their thought about a rejuvenated liberalism. The chapter locates the founding thinkers in the beleaguered cultivated bourgeois intelligentsia and its sense of a civilizational crisis of modernity that went back into the nineteenth century; in the disorder that was generated by the First World War and its aftermath, notably fears of communism and fascism; in the hyperinflation of 1923; in the Great Depression; and in brutal anti-Semitism. Prominence is given to Walter Eucken’s remarkable public lecture in 1936 on the struggle of science and his public debate in 1937 with a Nazi economist. The chapter examines how founding Ordo-liberals like Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke were viewed by fellow liberals like Friedrich Hayek, notably the emphasis placed on their strength of character and conviction. Finally, the chapter plots both the extraordinary growth of citations of Ordo-liberalism since the 1950s and its correlation with events; the shift towards seeing it as a cause of crises especially after 2009; and Ordo-liberalism in the context of post-1945 structural changes and debates about patriarchy and the role of women.

Ordoliberals studied the manifestations of power through a “morphological” lens (opposing the centrally administered economy to the economy of exchange), leading Eucken to take a stand in relation to two of the great international discussions of the discipline in the interwar years: the feasibility of a socialist calculation and the debate over imperfect/monopolistic market structures. The theoretical substance of these two debates is closely related to a political quest for stability of the economic and social order. The centrally administered economy is characterized by the strong influence of what ordoliberals saw as illegitimate powers on the economic process. But ordoliberals considered that, within the exchange economy system itself, markets were not free from power relations. The contribution of Stackelberg to the analysis of unbalanced market structures is therefore indispensable for understanding the literary marginalism of the ordoliberals.

From a political perspective, ordoliberals formulated a “new” social question based on the collapse of human freedom and autonomy in the face of the rise of private and public economic powers. Thus ordoliberals regarded the dispersion of economic power within the economic process as the key to overcome the social question. Finding an answer to the social question required the institution and perpetuation of the competitive order. Thus, the ordoliberal economic policy is directed toward the dispersion of economic power. Ordoliberals considered competition as a formidable tool for the disempowering of private economic power and for regulating the social body. Tracing the various manifestations of economic power led the ordoliberals to consider a broad program of economic and social policies that should be politically implemented by a strong state.

This first chapter outlines ordoliberals’ implicit philosophy of history, building a causal link between historical liberalism in the nineteenth century and economic planning as developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Ordoliberals based their historical interpretation on an anthropological hypothesis in which the instinct to acquire power is the driving force of mankind. To paraphrase Marx’s famous formula: for ordoliberals, history is the history of the struggles for economic power. Rather than reflecting on the conditions for the development of a competitive market economy, the ordoliberals analyzed what they perceived as the deleterious effects of certain types of economic systems (laissez-faire liberalism for instance) for the whole political and social order.

The introduction outlines the purpose of the book, its perspective, and its approach. Having identified three chronological moments in the making of ordoliberalism, the author illustrates its main themes and objectives and their relations with the current debate on ordoliberalism. The author then summarizes the contents of the book and indicates its basic structure and features, briefly anticipating its main conclusions. He examines the contributions of several important figures in the ordoliberal arena, including Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke, and gives a brief history of their works and their influence on modern economics as it pertains especially to Europe. A discussion of the concept of “power” in economics is also provided.

This last chapter outlines the ordoliberal discourse in the early postwar period (1946–1950) and the way it gained traction on the political stage. The author shows that the ordoliberals sought to establish a continuity between the economic order of the Third Reich and the administration of the Western Allies and thereby confronted political authorities with the fact that proper denazification could succeed only if Nazi planning methods were rejected. This argument has been constructed around various kinds of documentation, including advisory reports, newspaper/magazine articles, and academic publications. Ultimately, the chapter contributes both to a better definition of ordoliberal ideas (especially of their critical scope) and to a better knowledge of competing ideologies in the early Cold War context.

After having briefly summarized the content of the book, this concluding chapter uses the definition of ordoliberalism as a political economy of power to discuss what is today called the “ordoliberal core” of European governance. The conclusion shows that the word “ordoliberalism” refers to two separates—and at time conflicting—paradigms: an old form of political economy and a new form of neoliberal orthodoxy. Hence the conclusion investigates the reasons for the political success of ordoliberalism in the immediate aftermath of the war, as well as to what extent the lasting influence of the ordoliberal discourse was accompanied by its transformation: abandoning its original form of a political economy of power to embody the contemporary form of neoliberal orthodoxy in the European Union.

This chapter considers the development of German and European competition law, particularly Ordoliberalism and the Freiburg school of economic thought. It discusses the accounts of Franz Bohm, Walter Eucken, Hans Grossman-Doerty, and other ordoliberals. It looks into Ordoliberalism's policies and uses them as contrast and comparison to the development of English and American ideas concerning competition law. It also investigates some of the past and present ideological differences between antitrust law in Brussels and Washington.