UCLA

This dissertation examines the thought of the five principal thinkers of the distinctive German neo-liberal tradition of ordo-liberalism, a consistent and often prominent current in the intellectual life of the Bundesrepublik since the end of the Second World War. By way of intellectual profiles of these main figures, the dissertation shows that ordo-liberalism developed as a political rather than purely economic theory. Shaped by the double crisis of capitalism of the inter-war period – of inflation and global economic depression – it attempted a response to the failure of the liberalism of the time. From the 1920s, these thinkers sought institutional and social arrangements that would preserve the separation of economic and political spheres, which they believed to be the basic requirement of a functioning price mechanism. They achieved this by appeal to the state in its capacity to enforce this separation and regulate social life. The dissertation proceeds by close reading of the main texts of Walter Eucken (1891-1950) and Franz B�hm (1895-1977), representatives of the Freiburg School who developed a method of political economy and constitutional legal theory that sought to isolate the economic responsibilities of the state from democratic pressure. The dissertation then turns to the sociological thinkers Wilhelm R�pke (1899-1966) and Alexander R�stow (1885-1963), and profiles their development of a theory of mass culture and the measures the state might take to reintroduce and preserve a politics of vitality to combat it. The concluding chapter, on Alfred M�ller-Armack (1901-1978), theorist of capitalist crisis in the 1930s, economist of European integration within the Christian Democratic Union, and sociologist of religion, reconstructs his development of the social market economy and concludes with his response to the onset of the downturn of the 1970s. The dissertation shows that by various means, ordo-liberals of the first generation sought resolution to economic crisis directly through politics, and therefore were compelled to undertake comprehensive revision of liberal economics and political theory.