Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

100 Jürgen G. Backhausthe economies in transition after 1989, notably the East-German one. On page 11,you find a family tree of the Ordo-liberals (in the broader sense) which I reproducein Figure 8.1. It strikes me as an excellent didactical tool.The guest editor himself follows with an article on Walter Eucken’s contributionto economics in an international perspective. Of course, the purpose is to overcomethe “splendid isolation” in which the Ordo school had existed in German academiaand thereby curtailed its international influence. Eucken’s daughter, Irene Oswalt-Eucken, emphasizes neglected aspects of Walter Eucken’s work, notably freedomand economic power. Methodological aspects of Eucken’s work are taken up byCarsten Hermann-Pillath, and finally Leland Yeager has the exposition on capitaland interest mentioned above. There is a bibliography of Walter Eucken’s work,probably the first one in English, compiled from Wendula Gräfin von Klinckowstroem’sbibliography. This volume of just 80 pages is an excellent introductioninto Walter Eucken’s work for an English-language scholar.In 2000, two books on Walter Eucken were prepared in Freiburg, where hetaught from 1927 until his death in 1950 (in London while lecturing there). The firstbook, Walter Eucken and his Œuvre, was published under the auspices of the WalterEucken Institute at the University of Freiburg (Gehrken 2000). This valuable bookhas a somewhat uneven architecture. The bulk of the work, about two-thirds, is athorough intellectual biography of Walter Eucken authored by Wendula Gräfinvon Klinckowstroem. She includes not only an extensive bibliography, but also aseries of pictures. This long, book-length essay is preceded by a tabulated curriculumvitae of Walter Eucken. After an introduction, there is a 50 page article onWalter Eucken’s conception of Ordo theory by Lüder Gehrken and AndreasRenner. From this essay, we get an understanding of Walter Eucken’s method ofgaining scholarly insight. He conceived the scholar as standing outside society and,by necessity, having to ask radical questions. “Asking radical questions is the trademarkof the scholar” (p. 9). The purpose of asking these radical questions, however,is nevertheless the same as it was with the empirically minded scholars who usedhistorical methods. It was Eucken’s belief that he had overcome the historicalschool by accomplishing his concept of an Ordo theory. As Klinckowstroem pointsout, finding an answer to the social question became the purpose of the last 18 yearsof his scholarly life, to wit “how can a modern industrialized economy and societybe given a human and functional order?” (p. 71).The wide array of topics Walter Eucken is still able to inspire has been docu -mented in a Festschrift for Walter Eucken 50 years after his death (Külp andVanberg 2003). The book has four parts with a total of 24 chapters. The first part isentitled “Economic Policy as Policy with Respect to an Economic Order.” GeroldBlümle and Nils Goldschmidt deal with the normative foundations of Ordo-liberalthought. Likewise, Otto Schlecht, who for many years in Germany was responsiblefor translating Ordo-liberal principles into economic policy as state secretary in thefederal ministry of economics, discusses the ethical formations in Eucken’s work.Werner Zohlnhöfer takes an evolutionary view on Ordo-liberalism and the socialmarket economy. Walter Hamm, long-time co-editor of the liberal daily newspaperFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, takes one element of Ordo-liberal principles, the