Ordoliberals traced Nazism to technocratic state management, not capitalism

Evidence

Broadly speaking, everything which opposes liberalism and proposes state “management·of the economy thus constitutes an invariant whose history can be seen throughout the development of European societies since the”end of the nineteenth century and, more precisely, from the start of the twentieth century, that is to say, when the liberal art of government became, so to speak, intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itselffrom its own development. How did iury tolimitthem? Well; by a technique of intervention which consisted·in applying to society and the economy a type of rationality considered valid within the natural sciences. In short, what we can broadly call technology. Technicization 6f state management, .of control of the economy, and also in the analysis of economic phenomena, is what the ordoliberals call “eternal Saint-Simonism,,, and they identify Saint-Simon48 with the birth of that vertigo which takes hold of the liberal art of government and leads it to seek a principle of limitation, a principle of organization in the application to society of a schema of rationality specific to nature, a principle which ultimately leads to Nazism. So, from Saint-Simon to Nazism there is a cycle of rationality entailing interventions which entail the growth of the state, which entails setting up an administration that itselffunctions according to technical types of rationality, and this constitutes precisely the genesis of Nazism over two centuries, or at any rate a century and a half, ofthe history of capitalism. — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 671

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and explains the ordoliberal concept of ‘eternal Saint-Simonism’ as the genealogy of technocratic statism.
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘Saint-Simon to Nazism’ genealogy reframes modernity’s faith in technical rationality as a road to tyranny.
• XREF: connects to: Fascist state intervention in the private sector served capitalist interests, not state power — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1713; Ordoliberals viewed the Third Reich as the product of anti-liberal policy — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1172; Ordoliberalism denied an essential capitalist logic and made rival capitalisms inventable — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 940

Broader Connections

• Ordoliberals viewed the Third Reich as the product of anti-liberal policy #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1172
• Ordoliberalism denied an essential capitalist logic and made rival capitalisms inventable #expands (0.78) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 940