Hans-Helmuth Gander, Nils Godschmidt, and Uwe Dathe (eds.): Phänomenologie und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft. Edmund Husserl, Rudolf Eucken, Walter Eucken, Michel Foucault

Excerpt

The appeal of exploring the affinities between one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Edmund Husserl, and one of the great German economists of the 20th century, Walter Eucken, the preeminent figure of ordoliberalism and one of the intellectual founding fathers of West Germany, is easily understandable. In cultural terms one could say Eucken was born into philosophy. His father, Rudolf Eucken, a philosopher who is all but forgotten today, was extraordinarily popular in the first decades of the last century, even winning a Nobel Prize for literature. Walter Eucken taught economics at Freiburg, where he met and befriended Husserl. Eucken’s writings abound in methodological considerations, where Husserl is referenced occasionally. Therefore, Husserl has long been suspected of holding the key to a better understanding of Eucken, a claim taken more seriously after Michel Foucault notoriously endorsed it. Foucault asserts that Husserl exerted an important influence on Eucken and the other ordoliberals and, by implication, on the new form of liberalism, which presumably dominated the West after the Second World War (2004: 123f., 328). Yet Foucault’s presentation suffers both from a lack of formal precision and from adopting a hurried bird’s eye perspective over a vast number of sources, thinkers, and theories, meant to illustrate the emergence of a neoliberal “governmentality”. …