Walter Fröhlich’s Review of Ordo, Volume 10 (1959)

Walter Fröhlich’s review of the tenth volume of Ordo presents the yearbook as an intellectually coherent forum for German neoliberalism whose significance extends beyond its immediate national setting. His organizing concern is how its contributors connect economic analysis with the institutional, ethical, and political foundations of a competitive order. The review moves from the series’ postwar origins and shared outlook through the volume’s discussions of European integration, economic institutions, justice, and Catholic thought, before assessing its value for Anglo-American readers. Fröhlich’s judgment is qualified but favorable: uneven contributions nevertheless address fundamental questions that technically sophisticated economics can neglect.

Founded by Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm after the Second World War, Ordo appears annually as a complete volume. Fröhlich emphasizes its greater unity of purpose than an ordinary periodical. Its contributors share an interest in economic and social order, with economic organization predominating. He situates this enterprise within the unexpectedly strong postwar appeal of neoliberal ideas in Germany and identifies its connections with Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, and the Mont Pélérin Society. The social market economy emerges here as both an academic project and a policy orientation associated with Erhard.

Fröhlich reconstructs the project’s governing distinction through the series’ original foreword: an economically efficient order must also preserve human dignity, while competition requires an institutional framework.

This order is a competitive order which is claimed to be equally far away from central planning as it is from laissez faire.

The distance from both alternatives gives the state a specific responsibility rather than eliminating its role:

The state ought to set up and conserve the competitive economic order but the state must keep free from interfering with the day-to-day activities of business.

These sentences establish the lens through which Fröhlich reads the volume. Competition is its central motivating principle, but neither the state’s withdrawal nor the unrestricted exercise of private economic power constitutes an adequate account of freedom. The review also cautions that the contributors’ emphasis on competition is not uncritical.

Five of the fourteen major papers address freedom and competition in Western European integration. Röpke’s comparison of the Common Market and the Free Trade Area raises the possibility that integration among six countries could create a bloc and obstruct trade elsewhere, including within Europe. Fröhlich reports the warning without endorsing it as an established result: experience remains insufficient to judge it. Willgerodt examines how differing tax systems impede trade, particularly German turnover taxes and the equalization measures permitted under EEC agreements. Muthesius questions Euratom’s orientation toward governmental activity by emphasizing private development of civilian atomic energy.

The monetary contributions similarly connect international cooperation with domestic policy constraints. Lutz advocates flexible exchange rates as a means of securing freer currency exchange. Meyer argues that expecting other countries to adjust their policies to Germany’s balance-of-payments position is unrealistic. Appreciation of the mark would have been preferable; its politically motivated avoidance makes some domestic inflation unavoidable despite accumulating foreign-currency reserves. Fröhlich cites the rise in Germany’s cost-of-living index between 1954 and 1958 to underline the tension between apparently conservative policies and their outcomes. Integration thus appears as a set of concrete institutional problems, not simply an aspiration toward larger markets.

The remaining papers broaden the inquiry into the economic framework. Fröhlich briefly covers Möttelis on Swiss cartel legislation, Rasch on corporate and tax rules affecting retained-profit financing, and Leffson on judicial treatment of German overpricing statutes. He gives greater interpretive attention to essays likely to interest American readers. Hayek’s discussion of equality, value, and merit asks whether distributive—and perhaps contributive—justice can correct commutative justice without undermining properly understood equality. Fröhlich characterizes Hayek’s position sharply:

Hayek opposes as arbitrary and undesirable all but the rules of commutative justice.

This formulation presents Hayek’s essay as a challenge to merit-based correction of economic outcomes. Böhm’s historical argument supplies another distinction: freedom to compete differs fundamentally from freedom to agree not to compete, which he links to feudal survivals. Solterer, meanwhile, seeks a theoretical explanation of income distribution through Gibrat’s revision of Pareto’s Law, attempting to derive a stable wage share and increasing income equalization across differing political and social conditions.

Religious questions are integral to Fröhlich’s account because compatibility between neoliberalism and Catholic social teaching has practical importance in Western Europe. After recalling earlier contributions to this debate, he summarizes Kühnelt-Leddihn’s argument that Catholics must make final decisions on their own responsibility. Personal responsibility, on this reading, accords with fundamental Catholic theology. Fröhlich carefully notes that the essay addresses authority and liberal attitudes rather than economics directly.

The volume closes with more than one hundred pages of extended book reviews, including Ammon’s forty-page treatment of Eucken’s capital-theory studies. Fröhlich acknowledges differences in quality and importance, but locates the yearbook’s chief merit in its choice of questions:

There is merit in posing questions of a fundamental nature to which there are no easy answers instead of working out in ever greater detail the answers to questions which may not always be important.

His conclusion joins methodological and practical relevance. Ordo introduces an influential circle whose work matters both analytically and for policy. The review’s enduring emphasis is on economics’ responsibility to examine the purposes and institutional conditions of economic order, alongside the refinement of technical answers.