How German is German neo-liberalism?
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How German is German neo-liberalism? Joachim Zweynert
Published online: 28 March 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract In the relevant literature, different answers have been given to the question whether German neo-liberalism has its roots in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon liberalism or whether it reflects specific German traditions of thought. The paper focuses on the question how the German neo-liberals deal with the problem of social cohesion. The differences between Anglo-Saxon and German traditions of socio-philosophical thought are especially evident regarding this question. Thus, I argue, analysing how the German neo-liberals are dealing with this issue is particularly helpful to specify their relationship to the two traditions. Keywords Social Philosophy . History of economic thought . Neo-liberalism . Social cohesion JEL Codes B25 . B52
1 Introduction In the literature on the history of German neo-liberalism two lines of argument can be distinguished: Some authors try to define the place of Walter Eucken and the Freiburg school, the liberal-conservatives Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow, and the inventor of the concept of social market economy, Alfred Müller-Armack, in international, mainly Anglo-Saxon liberal economics (see e.g. Grossekettler 1997; Sally 1998a; Vanberg 2004). Basic questions then are: How do the concepts of the German neo-liberals relate to classical liberalism? And how do they relate to modern institutional economics and constitutional political economy in particular? Other authors, more interested in understanding the German neo-liberals within the context of their
J. Zweynert (*) Chair of International Political Economy, University Witten/Herdecke, Alfred-Herrhausen-Str. 50, 58448 Witten, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
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own place and time (see e.g. Rieter and Schmolz 1993; Goldschmidt 2002), emphasise how deeply they were influenced by specifically German economic ideas and by the younger Historical School in particular (Peukert 2000; Schefold 2003). The title of this paper already suggests that it belongs to this second rather than to the first mentioned current. However, concentrating on the issue of the sociophilosophical roots of German neo-liberalism, I will try to contribute to a better understanding of how it relates both to classical Anglo-Saxon liberalism and to specifically German traditions of thought. In order to avoid repeating what other authors have written, and to bring a so far somewhat neglected dimension into play, I will concentrate on two closely related issues playing an important role both in Adam Smith and in the German social science tradition: the problem of the functional differentiation of society and that of the main source(s) of social cohesion. Today, these two questions are usually treated as sociological, not as economic ones. However, they are central to the concepts of Adam Smith as well as those of German economists up to the 1950s, when they returned to the international mainstream which tend
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