2001 Volume 43 Issue 3 Pages 28-37
Ordo-liberalism as a social thought criticized thoughts in the age of Nazism and Bolshevism. And it was a critical thought of modernity. It argued problems of secularization and productions of substitute of religion, enormously urbanizing process, and especially social problems of proletarizing and popularizing of people. Ordo-liberalists had an outline design of future society that covered the establishment of an economic order of competition and price mechanism, governmental direction and securing the framework of a free competitive market economy, based on the major premise of preventing-monopoly, and a formation of state and society based on the social principles of Christianity, such as respect for personality, social solidarity and subsidiary principle. What, then is the contemporary significance of their thought, which was formed in the process of confronting totalitarianism? Two issues should be pointed out. First, in the economic dimension, ordo-liberalist theory was capable of predicting the crisis of ever-lasting stagnation in contemporary economy. It saw that the contemporary economy would inevitably face serious difficulties after satisfying the fundamental material desires of each member of society : that the mass production and mass consumption system would eventually fall in to a kind of deadlock. It further proposed a new economic system of low economic growth based on the consumers' point of view. Second, in society and political fields, ordo-liberalists warned against locating absolute value in formal democracy, and showed the importance of restructuring state and society by introducing the subsidiary principle. They called on citizens to enrich the autonomy of intermediate organizations in society, but they also called for the enforcement of a stable social order by state power where problems arose from the enrichment of autonomy. They inherited the positive elements of modern natural law, while reminding people of the significance of religious origins which modern natural law dismissed in the process of secularization. They also tried to associate themselves with common European values inherited from the ancient world. We may conclude that ordo-liberalism as a school of thought attempted to renovate liberalism by relativizing the modern era dominated by enlightenment rationality and regenerating the "traditional natural law" of older periods.
