Walter Eucken (1891–1950) and the Historical School

In the following, two visions (Heilbroner and Milberg 1995) of science, economy and society, will be compared. First, Eucken’s concept of ordered competition and secondly the institutional approach of the historical school (HS). For reasons of space and the high quality of the existing secondary literature we shall neither give an overview of the ordoliberal or historical school(s) as such, their impact on economic policy and their precise history of thought background or specific embeddedness in German history and policy, nor shall we describe in detail all aspects of Eucken’s work (see the bibliography and references in Walter Eucken Institut (Ed.) 1992, pp. 125–137). Instead, we shall follow Eucken’s main contributions in a more chronological order and confront them with the programme of the HS in terms of method, ‘theory,’ and social and economic policy implications.