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This chapter presents a genealogy of neoliberalism as a free-market ideational program, from the early decades of the 20th century through to its consummation with state power in the 1970s. Neoliberalism was born as a contradictory and contested project, specifically through a series of situated, sympathetic critiques of 19th-century laissez-faire. These were played out, most explicitly, through the work of the Mont Pelerin Society and its associated networks, though these have often been spaces of debate and contestation. In this sense, neoliberalism has always been an open-ended, plural, and adaptable project. At the heart of this lies its contradictory embrace of liberty and order — what can be seen as its ‘Chicago School’ and ‘Ordoliberal’ faces of neoliberalism, respectively. Highlighting the constructed nature of neoliberalism's ideational project, the chapter exposes some of the ‘hidden hands’ that shaped this purposive critique of, and alternative to, Keynesianism.

This chapter explores debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. This chapter argues that the impasse created between the economic and the political in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal State and the economy.

Current accounts of the interaction between competition law and state activities are based on a clear-cut old liberalism style distinction between “state”/“government” and “market” that does not take into account the emergence of the neoliberal state. By advancing a “bureaucratic-centered theory” of the competition law and state interaction, this chapter offers an alternative interdisciplinary theoretical framework that can be successfully transposed into different institutional and cultural settings.

Chapter 3 argues that the cooperation in the interwar period between, economically, unions and employers and, politically, between Social and Christian Democracy, estranged the liberal Protestant camp from its former pet project, social reform. An important consequence of this estrangement was the birth of ordoliberalism. Ordoliberalism, however, was much less influential in the postwar period than usually claimed. It legitimized a politics of non-intervention, which rather left a void for the corporate actors to fill, so it involuntarily furthered corporatism, not liberalism. Otherwise it provided the inability of the central state to actively manage the economy with a post hoc ideological justification. Thus, Germany’s postwar compromise was “bipolar,” combining corporatist cooperation between capital and labor, heavily reliant on the organizational and material resources of the welfare state, with a central government with limited capacity for macroeconomic steering and without the means of credibly issuing promises of full employment (as the main difference in comparison to the Scandinavian cases).

The chapter deals with the development of the welfare state in the first three decades after World War II, in which the West German economy ran through a remarkable catching-up process. Economic policy in the new Federal Republic of Germany in that period was decisively shaped and influenced by the ordoliberal ideas of Walter Eucken and the Freiburg school and the principles of the social-market economy. Whereas Keynesianism of the Hicks-Samuelson neoclassical synthesis had already evolved into the dominant view in the academic sphere during the 1950s, it took until the 1966–67 recession for Keynesianism to find a late (and short) entry into German economic policy with the entry of the Social Democrats into government and their charismatic minister of economics, Karl Schiller.

This chapter analyzes the development of French, German, and Italian liberalism from the nineteenth century to the 1980s, giving particular attention to each tradition’s conceptions of the role of the state and its relationship to groups and individual citizens. Using a broad range of historical source material and the works of influential political philosophers, it outlines the analytical frameworks central to French “statist liberalism,” German “corporate liberalism,” and Italian “clientelist liberalism.” It shows how these evolving traditions shaped the structure of each country’s postwar political-economic model and the policy priorities developed during the postwar boom through the early 1970s and provides conceptual touchstones for the direction and character of these traditions’ evolution in the face of the neoliberal challenge since the 1990s. The chapter demonstrates that each tradition accepted elements of a more liberal economic order while rejecting neoliberalism’s messianic market-making agenda and its abstract and disembedded political-economic vision.

The fact that the global dissemination of neoliberalism during the 1970s found postauthoritarian Spain with a critical mass of internationalized policy economists exposed to competing Keynesian and ordoliberal influences gave Spanish neoliberalism its moderate flavor. In postwar Spain, the relatively liberal regulation of the economics profession, the Western training of many key economists and the exposure to neoclassical economics of many academics during the interwar years facilitated the gradual spread of neoclassical economic ideas in both the central bank and academia. However, Anglo-American neoclassical economics had a major competitor in the local translation of Germany’s ordoliberalism, which contributed to the moderation of both Keynesian and neoliberal ideas in Spain throughout this country’s authoritarian and postauthoritarian history.

The interplay between external structural constraints, domestic institutions, and domestic ideological debates explains the resilience of disembedded neoliberalism in Romania after 2008. IFIs and transnational firms with political leverage knocked on an open door when they demanded deep austerity and neoliberal structural reforms. However, it was local intellectual innovations that explain why policy leaders at the highest levels outbid these demands with a blend of libertarian, conservative, and ordoliberal theories about the state and society. Benefiting from a period of institutional cohesion, many of these ideas jelled into policy. Although technocrats less committed to neoliberalism took up top posts in a new cabinet after 2012, their ideas had a limited reach in the policy process because of the constitutionalization of fiscal policy by the EU, the conditionalities of the Troika, the pressures of foreign capital, and the institutional fragmentation of the policy process.

Since its origins in the 1950s, European integration has entailed the creation of institutions whose rationale is to advance and maintain certain policy ends, notably the ‘four freedoms’ of the common market. As this chapter argues, the effect is that policy commitments have tended to be privileged over procedural arrangements. Rather than self-standing entities that can be put to different ends, broadly on the model of the modern state, one sees institutions evolving with the policies, and liable to be side-stepped should they fail to serve those ends. A non-hierarchical constitutional structure does little to inhibit these restructurings, indeed arguably gives further encouragement. The ideas and practices of emergency become ways to galvanize action, coordination, and innovation across a diverse and potentially recalcitrant institutional field.

At a first glance, to many observers the EU may appear to be an improbable illustration of the possibility of an extension of legitimacy and democratic justice beyond the state. In contemporary European constitutional debate constitutionalism and social democracy have become antagonists, with the survival of the one seeming to require sacrifice of the other. Authors in the tradition of ordoliberalism have celebrated the Europeanization process because it seemed to ultimately disconnect constitutionalism from democratic practice and to firmly entrench a logic of market evolution that marginalizes politics. Social democrats, by contrast, have come to believe that democracy can only flourish if the solidary politics of the nation retains its sovereignty against cosmopolitan, ‘constitutional’ intrusions from without. Proposals to deepen constitutional integration therefore give rise to the social-democratic objection. This chapter offers a stylized account of both views, which more or less mirror one another. This chapter then also provides an in-depth analysis of the CJEU’s jurisprudence in various domains regarding the efficacy of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (CFREU) in European private law: employment law and unfair terms in consumer contracts in particular. The chapter concludes that, contrary to expectations and concerns about a constitutional asymmetry between economic freedoms and fundamental social rights, the CJEU has in fact in many cases raised the standard of protection beyond the standard envisaged by national legal orders, thereby unblocking development.

In addressing the question of the extent to which the EU makes a difference to economic activity within and without its borders, chapter 4 questions the Freedom–Security relationship firstly over the pricing of pharmaceuticals and secondly around the regulation of inter-firm competition. The first case highlights how although the Freedom of large medicine manufacturers still tends to dominate EU government of this industry, calls for change in pricing practice are currently gaining more traction thanks to renewed definitions of Security that frequently take support from the value of Equality. Indeed, contrasting definitions of the latter—either as equal access for producers or as an egalitarian principle—also feature strongly in recent conflicts within neoliberalism that have split the makers and implementers of EU competition policy. The chapter as a whole thus shows that, the EU and its member states currently face a number of unresolved dilemmas about value hierarchization.

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.