Page 32 - The Making of the German Post-war Economy

INTRODUCTION 5

rejecting the interventionist state of the Third Reich and protecting the
individual from collectivism, necessarily meant adding the principle of
subsidiarity. In this respect, the sovereignty of the solidary citizen became
the fundamental normative principle and public acceptance became the
relevant legitimising criterion for any political action. Thus, in line with
these claims, the public were doubly the focal point: according to Ludwig
Erhard, the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, and sovereignty could be
achieved only if the public were determined to ascribe them priority;
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economic policy, being contingent on public acceptance, likewise had to
ascribe priority to the people. In this connection, the triad of solidarity,
subsidiarity, and sovereignty tended to lead to a ‘Third Way’ between
laissez-faire capitalism and collectivist socialism not only in socio-political
and economic terms, but also in philosophical ones. Rejecting capitalist
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individualism and socialist collectivism alike, this so-called ‘solidarism’ or
‘personalism’ became characteristic of any socio-political and economic
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concept put forth, and in particular the Social Market Economy. Starting
from the premise that its theoretical foundation, i.e. ordo-liberalism,
aimed to underpin a framework that encouraged ordinary people to
pursue their own interests together with the common good, Walter
Eucken et al. elaborated the interdependence of politics, economics and
the public, which finally became both the foundation and subject of
institutional and constitutional economics. It is the examination of this
interdependence between politics and the public that constitutes the
conceptual architecture of this research.
In order to assess the political communication as well as public
reception of emerging socio-political and economic models for post-war
Germany, this book is divided into two sections: while the first one
discusses the various academic and political concepts of economic policy
and their respective communication to both the political classes and the
public, the second section is concerned with the subsequent political
implementation of the prevailing Social Market Economy and the public
reception of economic liberalisation. This process of political
communication, defined as transmission of policy between political elites
and the public, not only reveals the statements by those who became
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active in post-war German politics and the reflections of what they
considered to be the popular mood, but it eventually accommodates the
posit for democratic action. In order to provide an accurate assessment of
the various academic and political models of economic policy and their
respective communication to the public, all then available channels for the
transmission of economic and political content are evaluated: publications
by academics and policy-makers, newspapers and party-press, radio and
election campaigns, press conferences, and, additionally, posters and