Foucault is right. This was the dominant school of
postwar German economic thought. It was indeed based in
Freiburg, and its chief policymaking follower was Ludwig
Ehard, put into place by the Americans as the organizer of
the Deutches Wirtschaftswunder (German Economic Miracle) in
1948, that is to set up the institutional structures of the
postwar West German economy. A well-known label for that
system, invented by Eucken, I believe, is
sozialmarktwirtshcaft, the "social market economy." Of
course this reflected many earlier tendencies, given that
social security was invented by Bismarck, but it more
strongly emphasized a reliance on free markets outside of
social policy, and had a strong anti-cartel thrust which was
identified with the Nazis, although the basic system of
financial control of corporations by banks (Hilferding's
finanzkapital) was not effectively challenged and remains
largely in place today.
Barkley Rosser
On Mon, 21 Apr 1997 06:56:13 -0700 (PDT) Doug Henwood
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In "The Birth of Biopolitics," one of the course descriptions collected in
> Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth [The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984,
> vol. 1] just out from the New Press, Foucault wrote:
>
> "...German liberalism of the second postwar period was defined, programmed,
> and even to a certain extent put into practice by men who, starting in the
> years 1928-1950, had belonged to the Freiburg school...and who had later
> expressed themselves in the journal Ordo. At the intersection of
> neo-Kantian philosophy, Husserl's phenemonology, and Weber's sociology, on
> certain points close to the Viennese economists, concerned about the
> historical correlation between economic processes and practical structures,
> men like Eucken, W. Roepke, Franz Bohm, and Von Rustow had conducted their
> critique on three different political fronts: Soviet socialism, National
> Socialism, and interventionist policies inspired by Keynes. But they
> addressed what they considered as a single adversary: a type of eocnomic
> government systematically ignorant of the market metchanisms that were the
> only thing capable of price-forming regulation. Ordo-liberalism, working on
> th basic themes of the liberal technology of government, tried to define
> what a market economy could be, organized (but not planned or directed)
> within an institutional and juridical framework that, on the on hand, would
> offer the guarantees and limitations of law, and, on the other, would make
> sure that the freedom of economic processes did not cause any social
> distortion."
>
> This was the topic of the first part of Foucault's course that year; the
> second was "what is called 'American neoliberalism': that liberalism which
> is generally associate with the Chicago school and which also developed in
> reaction against the 'excessive government' exhibited in its eyes, starting
> with Simon, by the New Deal, war-planning, and the great economic and
> social programs generally supported by postwar Democratic administrations."
>
> Does anyone know about the Ordo school Foucault spoke of?
>
> Two footnotes: (1) "biopolitics" is Foucault's term for the "endeavor,
> began in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems prsented to
> governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living
> human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate,
> longevity, race..." (2) In his book on Foucault, James Miller says that
> Foucault developed, late in his life, a serious sympathy in Austrian
> economics and English liberalism as limits to state power, and strategies
> for maximizing the play of individual "will" (spectres of Nietzsche....).
>
> Doug
>
> --
>
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217 USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
>
>
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
