Page 176 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

CONCLUSION 149

the individual. This research has recalled and contrasted the principal
academic and political approaches of that time, namely the economic and
socio-political ideas of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Erwin von Beckerath within the
Freiburg Circles, the Freiburg and the Cologne School of Economics, the
West German Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Union
and Christian Social Union, as well as the programmes of the less
influential but by no means negligible Liberal Democrats and the
Communist Party. In so doing, the focus has been neither on the genesis
nor the definition of individual concepts of economic policy, formed by
academics or politicians, but on their respective communication to the
public.
In their endeavours to anchor their particular economic ideas – often
diametrically opposed to one another, of course – the individual parties
stimulated not only the academic and political but also the public debate
on the political and economic reconstruction of occupied post-war West
Germany. Viewing in particular the extreme unparalleled depth of
Germany’s experience of totalitarianism, there was a broad consensus that
not only any political but also any economic system had to be democratic
in nature. The establishment and perpetuation of both political and
economic democracy thus required the inclusion of the populace in
decision-making which, in turn, had an effect on the communication of
socio-economic ideas. While the various neo-liberal approaches all
attached to the people the status of actual sovereign in an institutional
economic order, and recognised the interdependence of politics,
economics and the public, one particular school of economic thought
outpaced the others in communicating a model of coordinated economic
and social policy, namely the Social Market Economy. While that model
has been much praised and studied, its communication to and eventual
acceptance by the public have received considerably less attention. By
examining both the constitutive involvement of German parties in post-
war reconstruction and the role of the public during the process of
economic liberalisation, this research provided alternative explanations for
why the Social Market Economy prevailed as the socio-political and
economic model for the Federal Republic of Germany.
While the Communist Party would have faced restrictions on the
implementation of its programme due to guidelines issued by the Allied
authorities, and the Social Democrats did not put forth their own
economic concept, the Social Market Economy was by no means the most
elaborate or well defined socio-political or economic idea brought before
the public at that time; in fact, it was more a mélange of socio-political
ideas than a precise theoretical order. But what set the Social Market
Economy apart from other institutional approaches to economic