A Functional Alternative to Political Right: Social Contract Without a People

Abstract

Ordoliberalism is a German doctrine of law and political economy that has been influential in the self-definition of German economic and political system after the second world war. Though a product of the Weimar Republic crisis, ordoliberalism could be developed as a school and be displaying its practical impact only once a new democratic Germany had to be rebuilt from the ruins left by the totalitarian State. It was moreover instrumental in projecting and shaping the European community as a free market area, somehow disembedded from welfare nation-States. The basic functionalist legitimacy it offered to political authority indeed proved very powerful in the case of supranational institutional engineering. However, for several years such school of thought remained ignored in the narratives offered of European integration and its ideological motives. This article tries to reintegrate ordoliberalism in the narrative of European Union evolution especially by showing the centrality of such school of thought within the predicament of a polity under conditions of severe social (and national) pluralism. The article is also meant as a first attempt of a more general thesis: That ordoliberalism offers a foundational model, indeed a political theory, for a political right without politics, or, said differently, for a social contract without people.