Mestmäcker fused Hayek with Böhm to scale the economic constitution to the EEC level
Evidence
Mestmäcker was the key figure in theorizing the repercussion of the Rome treaty as a model of governance in Hayekian terms. Born in 1926, he was a whole generation younger than the original cohort of the Geneva School. Part of the so-called Flakhelfer generation, his defining young experience was not of the First but of the Second World War, and the Great Depression would have been only a dim memory from childhood. Mestmäcker studied with Böhm at the University of Freiburg and paid homage to the work of his mentor throughout his career. One scholar calls him the “leading representative of the second generation of ordoliberals.” His professional position was at the University of Saarland, but he was special adviser to the European Commission from 1960 to 1970. Mestmäcker saw the goal of “undistorted competition” in European Community law as “politically the most important effect of the appreciation of the legal shapability of the economic system, which in Germany was first recognized by Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm.” It managed to combine the ordoliberal attention to law with Hayek’s idea of “competition as a method of discovery.” Mestmäcker claimed to take from Böhm the idea that every economic order is the outcome of a political decision. He was the most important figure in combining Hayek with Böhm and scaling up the economic constitution to the suprastate level. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 684
Categorization
- DEFINE: Names the second-generation ordoliberal who bridged Hayek and Böhm; useful for understanding ordoliberalism’s evolution.
- XREF: Echoes the reader’s note on the economic constitution concept from earlier in Slobodian’s account of Eucken and Böhm. — connects to: Neoliberals saw the EEC as continental protectionism, not true integration — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 606