ABSTRACT
Ordoliberalism is a somewhat idiosyncratically German tradition in political economy that was relegated to obscurity outside of expert circles until the onset of the eurozone crisis and, particularly, the response to it. The major defect of the eurozone as a market is a missing insolvency order. Some commentators point to the questionable legal quality of the reformed euro regime as evidence of its non-ordoliberal nature. Indeed, ordoliberal thought always insisted on the proper juridification of frameworks for market orders and others. After all, they spoke of the legal dimension of the competitive order that would ensure market competition as an ‘economic constitution.’ The counterintuitive coordinating mechanisms of market economies were supposedly too difficult to comprehend for the great majority of the population, who instead tended to favor notions of ‘planning,’ thus jeopardizing the spontaneous order of markets with all of its merits.
