ABSTRACT
The claim was that ordoliberalism was one of the main culprits for the backwardness and insularity of German macroeconomic policy. Macroeconomics committee is meant to gather the leading academic macroeconomists based in the German-speaking countries. The 2009 German Methodenstreit abated rather quickly and made way for a number of separate if related methodological debates in economics, for instance a rekindled heterodox attack on mainstream economics blaming it and its alleged monism to be responsible for the financial crisis and the Great Recession. The question remains whether ordoliberalism had a political influence even if it had little academic influence in Germany. German economic policymakers were essentially accused of mercantilism, sometimes mocked as “Merkelantilism.” The German business daily Handelsblatt called this affair the “Cologne emeritus uprising." Ordoliberalism’s political and intellectual success needs an explanation, as indeed Germany seems to have embarked on a partial Sonderweg, an idiosyncratic path, in embracing it.
