New directions in research on ordoliberalism

The Special Issue “New Directions in Research on Ordoliberalism” in Constitutional Political Economy presents ordoliberalism as a living research program within constitutional political economy (CPE), not an antiquarian episode in German economic thought.¹ It is the fruit of two scholarly encounters that have framed the agenda. The initial encounter was at the 1st workshop “Ordoliberalism: The Next Generation” (Freiburg, Germany, July 8–9, 2022), a joint venture of the NOUS Network for Constitutional Economics and Social Philosophy, the University of Freiburg, Pomona College, Aktionskreis Freiburger Schule and Wilhelm-Röpke-Institut. It was explicitly designed to connect ordoliberalism to contemporary conversations in philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) as well as in law, with an emphasis on renewing questions of method and normativity for a new cohort of researchers. The second encounter was at the “Ordoliberalism Workshop” (Montpellier, France, July 7, 2023) that broadened the scope of inquiry by examining whether, and in what sense, ordoliberalism extended beyond Germany – to France, Italy, the Netherlands, the Anglo-American world – while exploring its place within the broader landscape of mid-twentieth-century liberal thought. The sequence of these two workshops illustrates the continuity between the methodological and the comparative scope: they not only aspired to lay the groundwork for a renewal of ordoliberal thought within constitutional political economy, but also expanded the analytical horizon beyond the German context, thus providing an international and interdisciplinary framework for the contributions collected in this volume.

At a programmatic level, the Special Issue seeks to fulfill the aims of modern ordoliberalism: to analyze and design legal-institutional “rules of the game” that safeguard “competition on the merits” (Leistungswettbewerb in German) and disperse economic and political power; to connect positive institutional analysis with explicit normative standards; and to remain open to cross-fertilization with PPE, to dialogue with various liberal traditions and empirical policy debates, rather than retreating exclusively into a historical exegesis of texts. The ultimate goal of this endeavor is to develop what Dold and Krieger (2019, 2025) call a “contemporary ordoliberalism” or Zweynert et al. (2016) and Kolev (2018) a “new economics of order”.

Two developments motivate a fresh agenda. First, recent history shows that ordoliberal ideas do not sit outside the main line of CPE but intersect with it: the programmatic concern with constitutional rules and with consumer and citizen sovereignty has been refined by contemporary ordoliberals drawing on Hayek’s evolutionism and Buchanan’s contractarianism. This intellectual renewal enables an updated dialogue on institutional design and economic policy, integrating both historical traditions and contemporary transnational challenges. Second, new policy domains – such as digital markets governed by gatekeeper platforms and climate policy under severe knowledge and incentive constraints – pose challenges for any liberal institutionalism. If ordoliberalism is to have a continuing analytical value, it must demonstrate its robustness in these domains while retaining its normative core.

The five contributions gathered here address precisely this mix of foundational, historical, applied, and comparative questions. It begins with Tim Krieger’s and Daniel Nientiedt’s historical map of ordoliberalism’s late-twentieth-century renaissance, turns to Malte Dold’s reconstruction of the program’s normative foundations under realistic behavioral assumptions, moves on to applications in two contemporary policy arenas – digital competition (Anselm Küsters) and environmental governance (Justus Enninga) – and concludes with Marie Daou’s study positioning ordoliberalism within the broader spectrum of European liberal thought, highlighting transnational, institutional and constitutional implications.

In more detail, Tim Krieger and Daniel Nientiedt reconstruct the late-twentieth-century “renaissance of ordoliberal reasoning” in German economics during the 1970s and 1980s, sparked by the crisis of Keynesian demand management and an associated reconsideration of rule-based policy. They show that ordoliberal arguments resurfaced across debates on unemployment, social security, competition policy, public services, and European integration – yet without re-establishing a lasting methodological foothold in academic economics. The paper diagnoses a failure to advance theory in ways that connect to international research programs (new institutional economics, CPE), leaving ordoliberalism vulnerable to the charge of being a set of rather dogmatic policy prescriptions rather than a research program with distinctive microfoundations. That diagnosis sets the stage for the Special Issue’s next step: if ordoliberalism is to be “research-program worthy,” it must (re)articulate its normative foundations under realistic behavioral assumptions and speak to today’s institutional problems.

Malte Dold tackles a core theoretical challenge: when preferences are endogenous – context-dependent, malleable, and shaped by socio-cultural environments – what becomes of welfare analysis and normative economics? Engaging with Viktor Vanberg and Carl Christian von Weizsäcker as leading contemporary ordoliberal thinkers, Dold argues that a CPE built on choice individualism and individual sovereignty must accommodate not merely outcome freedom (satisfying evolving preferences) but also process freedom (the agentic capabilities enabling individuals to scrutinize and revise those preferences). On his account, normativity in ordoliberal CPE cannot be reduced to information transparency or external structural competition alone; it must also speak to conditions of autonomy under preference endogeneity. This is not a departure from ordoliberalism’s focus on the rule of law but a deepening of its justificatory structure. From a research program perspective, the paper anchors ordoliberalism more firmly within a modern CPE that respects behavioral findings without relinquishing its contractarian benchmark of citizen and consumer sovereignty.

Anselm Küsters then moves from these foundations to a domain where ordoliberal concerns are immediate: digital platform markets. Starting from the Freiburg School’s classical distrust of power concentrations and its insistence on a level playing field enforced through general rules, he uses an ordoliberal lens to assess the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), as well as China’s post-2020 “tech crackdown.” The ordoliberal benchmark emphasizes structural conditions for competition on the merits, strong rule-of-law constraints, and limited administrative discretion. On that yardstick, the paper highlights convergences (e.g., the EU’s obligations on interoperability, self-preferencing, and data access, all aimed at restoring contestability) but also flags procedural tensions and risks of discretionary enforcement in both regimes. Critically, Küsters argues that a modernized ordoliberal approach must be as attentive to procedural safeguards as to substantive structure: in fast-moving digital contexts, legality and administrability are not afterthoughts but part of the competitive order itself.

Justus Enninga asks whether liberal democracies – and ordoliberalism as a guidance for policy design – are up to the climate challenge. Using the robust political economy (RPE) framework, he tests ordoliberal institutions under two non-ideal conditions central to environmental governance: bounded knowledge and imperfect motivation. The analysis leads towards a criticism of eco-authoritarian proposals that downplay information and incentive problems, and instead articulates a “green ordoliberalism” in which markets serve as (i) technology drivers (discovery), (ii) coordination devices (prices), and (iii) community drivers (local experimentation), while universalizable political rules minimize rent-seeking and enhance predictability. The paper provides a sober assessment of real-world cap-and-trade systems (EU ETS), acknowledging deviations from ordoliberal rule criteria (generality, abstraction, certainty) alongside measurable reductions in emissions. This amounts to a call for institutional refinement, not for technocratic discretion unconstrained by rules.

Finally, Marie Daou’s paper revisits the European ordoliberalism focus of the Montpellier workshop by examining whether the French thinker Jacques Rueff can be considered an ordoliberal. Rueff’s proximity to ordoliberalism is evidenced not only by his correspondence with Ludwig Erhard and Wilhelm Röpke, but also by his own conception of a “social and liberal order.” His emphasis on state intervention for collective ends, concern for institutional stability, the central importance of institutions and the legal system in organizing economic and social life resonate strongly with ordoliberal values. Yet important differences remain in how order is achieved, the perspective, and the relative weight assigned to economic and social components. This comparative analysis does more than map intellectual genealogies: it clarifies how similar normative commitments and constitutional concerns were articulated in different national traditions and what counts as ordoliberal beyond the Freiburg School. This mapping widens the domain in which ordoliberal research questions can be asked today – particularly in European debates on the legal-institutional underpinnings of the market order.

Taken together, the five papers substantiate an ordoliberalism that is neither a narrow historical label nor a loose policy menu. At its core lies a distinctive constitutional stance:

Against this backdrop, several implications for CPE research follow from the Special Issue’s trajectory.

For the purposes of this introduction, it is useful to return, finally, to the workshops that incubated these articles. At the Freiburg event, we asked how ordoliberalism could be integrated with PPE and law, and how to facilitate a generational handover by facilitating a dialogue between young scholars and well-established discussants. The present Special Issue reflects this intention by foregrounding contributions by young scholars that cut across normative theory, positive institutional analysis, and policy practice. At the Montpellier meeting, the horizon was even wider: to ordoliberalism conceived as one branch of a transnational liberal dialogue situated within diverse and sometimes interconnected national contexts. The workshop exemplifies this comparative approach by providing a counterpoint to research focused on the Freiburg School, and by enriching the study of ordoliberalism with an international dimension.

As a matter of scholarly continuity, we also wish to note the momentum sustained by the 2nd Freiburg workshop “Ordoliberalism: The Next Generation” in 2024 (not linked to this Special Issue), which further consolidated the network of researchers working at the CPE/ordoliberal interface. Mentioning it here underscores that the contributions assembled in this Special Issue are not isolated interventions but points along a growing research trajectory centered on rules, sovereignty, and robust institutional design.

The five papers in this collection yield a coherent message. In the past, ordoliberalism’s renaissance faltered because it failed to entrench itself as a theoretically self-conscious research program. Embedded into the research program of CPE grounded in sovereignty and choice, however, it remains viable once it addresses endogenous preferences and the conditions of the agents’ autonomy. In application, ordoliberalism has distinctive contributions to make where the design of rules must discipline concentrated private (platform) power without amplifying unconstrained public discretion, and where environmental policy must perform under radical uncertainty and pervasive rent-seeking. European liberalisms share enough structural commonalities to justify a transnational research agenda, yet they also exhibit persistent differences that help delineate the distinct conceptual profile of ordoliberalism.