Knut Wolfgang Nörr und die Geschichte des Wirtschaftsrechts in ökonomischer Perspektive

Abstract

In the early 1990s, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation organized a series of working groups that explored the history of the humanities in Germany in the 1920s. Knut Wolfgang Nörr took the initiative to merge his working group on the history of jurisprudence with that led by Friedrich Tenbruck (who was later succeeded by Karl Acham) on sociology, and that of the author on economics, in order to pursue the process by which the old German Staatswissenschaften split into separate disciplines. While interacting less, they all had to respond to changing challenges such as those connected with the First World War. The paper concentrates on Nörr’s personal contribution. He started from Adolph Wagner’s view of law as derived from the state, as opposed to the traditional foundation of civil law on Roman private law. Cooperatives, social policy, the first elements of the welfare state created under Bismarck, cartels and state enterprises led to conceptions of an organized capitalism that were reflected in the paragraphs dealing with economic matters in the Weimar Constitution. The joint Thyssen project was extended, and the joint working groups considered in subsequent sessions (later published in two volumes) how liberalism was revived as ordoliberalism, in theory as a clandestine oppositional movement during Nazism, in practice – though subject to various compromises – after the Second World War, and how the academic outlook in the three disciplines of the humanities changed around 1968. Nörr examined how Keynesianism and planning optimism came into conflict with the ordoliberal conception. The constitution of the Federal Republic did not define the economic order, the social market economy was ambiguous between the principles of efficiency and redistribution. The state had a duty to stabilize the economy according to the law of 1967, but the legal standards to judge whether this obligation was being fulfilled were ill-defined. The economist, however, has to confront the economic crises and has to propose measures to mitigate them, and so it becomes a new task to reconcile ordoliberal principles with requirements of Keynesian stabilisation policies.