ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the politics of economic management in the 1970s in a narrative fashion and offers an analysis of the character of the system of economic management and of the language of political economy in the Federal Republic. The politics of economic management in West Germany appears somewhat obscure to many foreign observers of the German political scene. Neo-liberals like the French Prime Minister Raymond Barre and the leadership of the British Conservative Party have sought to justify redesign of methods of economic management by reference to the German model. However, the 1960s saw the growth of Keynesian thought, its political expression by the Social Democratic Party Economic Minister Karl Schiller after 1966, and its embodiment in the new policy instruments that were created by the law on stability and growth of 1967. Research Minister Volker Hauff produced a rigorous energy-saving programme which was blocked in cabinet by the Economics Minister Graf Otto Lambsdorff who opposed such governmental intervention.
