Can ordoliberalism save the world?

Walter Benjamin asked us to do ‘brush history against the grain’: Reading historical facts, events, texts not from the point of view of the ‘victor’ and ‘ruler,’ but from that of the oppressed.

Current day critical Zeithistoriker often claim themselves of Benjamin’s heritage. Yet, all too often, they interpret ‘brushing history against the grain’ as meaning that historical events, texts, materials are judged by current day standards. That is a very effective strategy to capitalise on today’s outrage economy in academia and beyond. But it can lead to bad faith interpretations of historical facts and prevents scholars from going beyond critique and developing alternative futures.

In a new paper in Journal of Corporate Law Studies IMEG member Gerhard Schnyder and Mathias Siems (Professor at the European University Institute) do the opposite: They take ideas that emerged in a different context seriously and think about what they can tell us about current day issues. They ask the question (tongue-in-cheek): ‘Can ordoliberalism save the world?’

This is certainly speculative thinking. Yet, Hegel taught us that speculative thinking  – if done “responsibly” – is an important complement to critical thinking.

While classical ordoliberalism may not save the world, Siems and Schnyder argue that one thing it does do much better than any current day form of (neo-)liberalism and indeed any economic theory, is drawing our attention to the crucial fact that concentrated private economic power is as big a threat to freedom (in the Kantian sense of autonomy) and to democracy than is an overbearing state.

Applying ordoliberal analysis of the problem of concentration of economic and political power to the case of Corporate Social Responsibility suggests that there is something so fundamentally wrong with our system that any level of CSR/ESG legislation will not be able to fix it. Instead, policy makers would do well to start taking the problem of concentrated private economic power and its translation into the political realm seriously. (The EU’s meek position against Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic is a case in point).

Download the open access article here.