Hayek in Freiburg

Abstract

The University of Freiburg is known as home of the ordoliberal Freiburg School (Vanberg, 1998), a research tradition that was founded in the 1930s by a group of economists and jurists¹ who shared the conviction that a properly functioning market order needs to be framed by appropriate rules, that such a framework is not self-generating but needs to be cultivated and enforced by government, and that law and economics are called upon to provide the institutional knowledge required for that purpose. To this research tradition and, specifically, to its principal founder, Walter Eucken, Hayek referred when, on 18 June 1962, in his inaugural lecture at the university of Freiburg he stated:

Special mention is due to the personal contacts with professional colleagues which have for decades provided for me a connection with this university…. By far the most important for me was, however, the friendship of many years’ standing, based on the closest agreement on scientific as well as on political questions, with the unforgettable Walter Eucken. During the last four years of his life this friendship had led to close collaboration…. You know better than I what Eucken has achieved in Germany. I need therefore not explain further what it means if I say here today that I shall regard it as one of my chief tasks to resume and continue the tradition which Eucken and his friends have created at Freiburg and in Germany.