Ellen Kennedy

Class of Spring 2011

Professor of Political Science

University of Pennsylvania

Walter Eucken and the Ordo Liberals

At the Academy, Kennedy completed the final section of a book on the economic sources of executive prerogative. Its first two sections explore two economic and financial crises – in 1920s Weimar Germany and the Depression-era US – as the source of greatly expanded executive-branch powers in both countries’ constitutions. In both cases, “economic emergencies” produced mighty increases in presidential power and fundamentally shifted the boundaries of the constitutional state. Kennedy uses these historical examples to underline the fragility of “rule of law” concepts in modern democratic constitutions – and, indeed, the risks of excluding the factor of “economics” from a “political/consitutional” binary. What, in the face of today’s pressing economic problems, are the alternatives? The last part of her book, “The Political Theory of Market Governance: Walter Eucken and the Ordo Liberals,” reexamines theories offered by postwar Germany’s Ordoliberalen – the political economists gathered around Walter Eucken and Franz Böhm and associated with the Freiburg-based journal ORDO (The Ordo Yearbook for Economic and Social Order). Already in the final years of the Weimar Republic, Eucken had begun to pose the essential questions of the “social market” (Marktwirtschaft) and warn against doctrinaire approaches to the crisis of 1929. His mature concept of liberal, rule-of-law governance helped set the intellectual foundation of West Germany’s postwar social market economy and its attendant “economic miracle.”

Ellen Kennedy writes on a variety of subjects in political economy and the history of modern European political and legal theory. Her main areas of interest include political theory, jurisprudence and legal theory, comparative government, and Western Europe – Germany’s political and economic system in particular. She is the author of Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Duke University Press, 2004), The Bundesbank, from the series “Key Institutions of German Democracy” ( Johns Hopkins, 1997), The Bundesbank: Germany’s Central Bank in the International System (Council on Foreign Affairs, 1991), and Freedom & the Open Society: Henri Bergson’s Contribution to Political Philosophy (Garland, 1987). She has also co-edited the volume Women in Western Political Philosophy (Harvester, 1986).

Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, Kennedy was a lecturer in politics and government in England, at the universities of London, York, and Manchester. She has been a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Friedreich Ebert Foundation as well as the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation, and she was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2007–08.