Page 131 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

104 THE MAKING OF THE GERMAN POST-WAR ECONOMY

650,000 leaflets prior to the election in order to urge voters to cast their
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ballots only for ‘Christian candidates’. After all, the proponents of a
liberal economic policy or the Social Market Economy received backing
and even promotion from leading economists and academic schools of
economic thought. Already during the Third Reich, the committed
opponents of the totalitarian National Socialism and advocates of neo-
liberal economic policy, the members of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Erwin von
Beckerath within the Freiburg Circles, aimed at introducing liberal
economic thinking in post-war Germany. Although limited in their room
for manoeuvre in times of political persecution and later Allied
occupation, Erwin von Beckerath, Adolf Lampe, Constantin von Dietze,
Franz Böhm, Walter Eucken, Jens Jessen, Erich Preiser, Günter
Schmölders, Heinrich von Stackelberg, Theodor Wessels, Clemens Bauer,
Gerhard Albrecht and Fritz Hauenstein considerably contributed to the
conceptual development of a socially-oriented market economy, and its
eventual acceptance in academia, politics and among the public. Whereas
the Freiburg Circles mainly influenced the academic discussion, the
Freiburg School, with its pivotal members Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm,
Hans Großmann-Doerth, Friedrich A. Lutz, Karl Friedrich Maier, Fritz
Walter Meyer and Leonhard Miksch, additionally stimulated the public
debate on liberal socio-economic ideas. The credit for having promoted
and established ordo-liberal ideas in the German general public, however,
is primarily due to Wilhelm Röpke. The German economist, intent on
contributing to the cure of the German post-war economy, addressed the
readership outside academia in the majority of his roughly eight hundred
publications. Thereby he arguably became the intellectual figure in the
establishment of economic liberalism in post-war Germany, and
stimulated and influenced the public and political debate in equal measure.
In drawing on Eucken’s ordo-liberal competitive order and Röpke’s
economic humanist approach, the social-liberal Cologne School around
the economist and anthropologist Alfred Müller-Armack pursued an
economic order providing a synthesis of seemingly conflicting objectives,
namely economic freedom and social security. Although this holistic
concept labelled Social Market Economy is often viewed as a mélange of
socio-political ideas rather than a precisely outlined theoretical order, the
conception possessed an effective slogan, which facilitated its
communication to the populace. The eventual implementation, however,
required not only communication but also political backup. Here, the
socio-economic concept received considerable support from the
Wissenschaftliche Beirat bei der Verwaltung für Wirtschaft as an official panel of
economic experts and the Industrie- und Handelskammern as representative
corporate institutions with extensive public functions. Both organisations