The Economic State and the Ordoliberal Critique of Keynesianism

Abstract

Abstract Keynesianism and Ordoliberalism differ with regard to labour markets and collective bargaining in particular. Contrary to Foucault’s claims, however, Walter Eucken conditionally supported Wilhelm Lautenbach’s proto-Keynesian proposal to use public investment to overcome economic stagnation in the early 1930s. And the late 1960s witnessed a pragmatic realignment of modern (Keynesian) macroeconomics and Ordoliberal objectives advanced by economists Karl Schiller and Herbert Giersch. The episode was short-lived due to intransigent trade unions and Social Democratic politicians. Resulting worries about monetary stability transformed and radicalised German neoliberalism in the course of the 1970s. Although Ordoliberals attacked the weak ‘economic’ state on principle, due to the excessive influence of business and labour and resulting state interventions, they relied on a ‘strong state’ to maintain distinct, yet interdependent, economic, political and social orders. Semantic opposition to the economic state thus is best understood as the Ordoliberal way to oppose decommodification of labour and social assistance.