The “New” Crisis of the Liberal Order: Populism, Socioeconomic Imbalances, and the Response of Contemporary Ordoliberalism

Abstract

In the face of the “new” crisis of liberalism, our paper follows the spirit of Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society and argues for a renewal of (ordo)‌liberal thinking. Similar to Lippmann, we argue that our current liberal economic order is unfit to deal with fundamental social asymmetries. The benefits of economic integration are distributed unevenly with urban economic and political elites as main beneficiaries and supporters of the current order, while neglecting less-skilled, rural workers. In this paper, we argue for a contemporary ordoliberalism that takes up this distributional challenge. In spite of recurrent criticism of its value-laden nature, we argue that the normativity of ordoliberalism is actually an asset in the current debate on populism.