CONCEPT
Ordoliberalism
The German economic tradition—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow—that advocated extending market logic into every domain of life through state construction of competitive conditions; the intellectual blueprint for neoliberal governance.
Ordoliberalism is the school of German economic thought, developed in the 1930s-1950s by Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, and
Alexander Rüstow, that provided the intellectual architecture for what would become neoliberal governance. Unlike classical liberalism, which advocated minimal state intervention, ordoliberalism insisted the state must actively construct the conditions for market competition—establishing legal frameworks, preventing monopolies, ensuring price stability, and most importantly, producing subjects who think and act according to market logic. The ordoliberals did not merely want free markets in the economic sphere. They wanted the extension of the competitive principle into domains previously organized by other logics: family, education,
culture, the self. Foucault identified ordoliberalism as the crucial genealogical source of contemporary governmentality in his 1978-79 lectures. Bröckling extended Foucault's analysis by tracing how ordoliberal thought descended from economic theory into management discourse, self-help culture, and the institutional practices that manufacture entrepreneurial subjects. The relevance to AI is structural: the regime that produces subjects who optimize themselves without external coercion is the regime into which AI tools arrive—not creating