Lebensphilosophie and the vitalist foundations of ordoliberalism

Ordoliberals grounded their understanding of nature in Lebensphilosophie, a tradition that Rudolf Eucken, Walter Eucken’s father, helped shape as one of its leading figures in Germany.Footnote ¹⁵ Rudolf won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908 for “proclaim[ing] the failure of materialism,” as a Belgian newspaper detailed.Footnote ¹⁶ He advocated schöpferischer Aktivismus, according to which philosophy was to awaken and activate the spiritual life force of humanity.Footnote ¹⁷ He argued that the nineteenth century’s turn toward empiricism marked a decisive shift in humanity’s orientation: modern culture turned away from an “invisible” world of metaphysical and religious meaning and toward the “visible” world of empirical, material existence.Footnote ¹⁸ He believed that scientific rationalism, industrial expansion, and social utilitarianism increasingly directed attention to what could be observed, measured, and mastered.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus he claimed that meaning came to be sought within worldly reality itself, above all in work and productivity, rather than in transcendent or spiritual ideals.Footnote ²⁰ The ordoliberals also emphatically engaged with Lebensphilosopher outside the German sphere, like Henri Bergson and José Ortega y Gasset, especially in relation to their fears of overpopulation and “the masses.”Footnote ²¹

Eucken stated, “My father recognized the danger to the modern world. He grasped that his time had lost sight of the fundamental standards.” He continued that his father sought “in the ever-changing nature of time something solid,” values “which are unshakable and provide a sound footing.”Footnote ²² Present-day ordoliberals Uwe Dathe and Nils Goldschmidt outlined how “Walter Eucken admired and loved his father. He valued Rudolf Eucken’s central ideas throughout his life, and his own scholarly work, both in method and in ethical orientation, can only be properly understood on this basis.”Footnote ²³

This Lebensphilosophie served as a precursor to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which was also integral to the ordoliberal worldview and their relation to nature.Footnote ²⁴ Husserl was a close friend of both Rudolf and Walter and godfather to Walter’s daughter Irene.Footnote ²⁵ Husserl stated that the nineteenth-century focus on positivist science led to a neglect of deeper human questions, arguing that a science confined to objective facts risked overlooking the meaningful aspects of existence and history’s spiritual and moral dimensions.Footnote ²⁶

Inspired by Husserl and Rudolf Eucken, the ordoliberals also identified a significant spiritual and material rupture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ordoliberals believed that the eighteenth century was defined by its “warm humanness,” its preference for socializing in small circles, its gardening and idealization of rural lifeFootnote ²⁷ Röpke opined that the nineteenth century, on the other hand, “Abandons itself to the intoxication of sheer numbers, brutal strength, restless busyness, sterile excitement, enormous dimensions, reverence of strength, legitimization through sheer quantitative size, boundlessness, mechanical organization and centralization, aimless development, which is determined by factors outside and above man, the massive, overloaded and elephantine.”Footnote ²⁸ The ordoliberals believed that, while the nineteenth century successfully universalized the ideals of freedom and equal rights, it also severed individuals from their religious and community bonds, filling the resulting inner void with an overvaluation of material concerns.Footnote ²⁹

Müller-Armack argued that the onslaught of secular, rationalist-domineering ideas saw interactions move away from social obligation to rational desires for acquisition and categorization.Footnote ³⁰ The esprit géométrique fostered by Enlightenment thought had transcended the scientific domain, which, to the ordoliberals, had become increasingly inflated in society, to influence social and economic action as well.Footnote ³¹ Echoing his father, Eucken claimed that “the belief in gods, giants and spirits, which used to dominate man’s relationship, with nature was replaced by the rationality of science, a belief that has taken root and expanded into the realms of society and the economy as well.”Footnote ³²

The ordoliberals argued that this instrumental rationality came to dominate the human relationship with nature as well. Rüstow decried how the “mastery of nature is still considered a justified, self-evident good,” warning that the irreparable and irreversible consequences of this will be detrimental not only to nature but also to humanity.Footnote ³³ He claimed that “the secrets of nature are no longer marveled at in a reverent way but rather, are cunningly stalked; to overpower them man behaves like a hunter, almost like a burglar.”Footnote ³⁴ Such statements reflect a vitalist conception of nature, which rejected its reduction to a mere object of domination and regarded it as indispensable to both human flourishing and social stability.

The influence of the Conservative Revolution

This conception of nature was also influenced by the “Conservative Revolutionaries” of the Weimar period.Footnote ³⁵ The ordoliberals, most notably Röpke, engaged with these new ideas and selectively appropriated certain elements, while explicitly criticizing and distancing themselves from the movement itself.Footnote ³⁶ The “Conservative Revolutionaries” articulated a rightist environmental response to the debates on modernity, particularly highlighting the civilizational crisis brought about by technological progress. In Man and Technics (1931) Oswald Spengler described technology as “unnatural” and blamed it for the widening rift between humanity and the universe, warning against deforestation, climate change, and extinction.Footnote ³⁷

Similarly, Friedrich Georg Jünger’s Failure of Technology (1946) condemned the detrimental impact of technology on nature: “The machine invades the landscape with destruction and transformation … Technology darkens the air with smoke, poisons the water, destroys the plants and animals … [it is] the most complete and the most intensive exploitation on a planetary scale.”Footnote ³⁸ Müller-Armack expressly concurred with Jünger’s criticism of technology and maintained that “in the advance of technology … humankind has crossed a boundary.”Footnote ³⁹ Spengler and Jünger idealized a return to a preindustrial past, expressing a pessimism about Western civilization’s future, and endorsed nationalist and antidemocratic ideas as preferable to liberalism. It is therefore evident that, while echoing similar social critiques of technology and modernity, the Conservative Revolutionaries envisioned remedies quite different from those proposed by the ordoliberals.

Spengler and Jünger significantly influenced Martin Heidegger, who argued that modern technology reduces nature and living beings, including humans, to a calculable resource to be exploited, thereby obscuring their intrinsic worth and leading to ecological and existential danger.Footnote ⁴⁰ Though later echoing Heidegger’s views on nature, Eucken positioned himself strongly against Heidegger throughout their time at the University of Freiburg in the 1930s and 1940s. Eucken, who was professor at Freiburg from 1927 until his death in 1950, was a vocal opponent of Heidegger, who was rector of the university from 1933 to 1934.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, Heidegger and the ordoliberals articulated similar critiques of technology, with Röpke criticizing what he saw as the “pseudo-religious belief in technology as the pacemaker and indictor of progress.”Footnote ⁴² Rüstow dedicated an entire essay in the 1951 publication of ORDO to Kritik des technischen Fortschritts, finding that “knowledge is power, and this power is wrestled from nature and is exercised and proven through technical application.”Footnote ⁴³ Müller-Armack also firmly believed that it is “necessary to avoid succumbing to a form of technological advancement that distorts life.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The ordoliberals observed how technological progress was causing irreparable damage to nature, with Röpke noting how “we abuse nature at every turn, even to the total disappearance of the countryside.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He deplored how we “rob nature of her mysteries” and how every shrub or “excessive” tree is wiped out.Footnote ⁴⁶ He continued, “we have no regard for tree or beast and treat them like materials or machines … one valley after another is submerged under the reservoirs of power stations so that more men can shave with electric razors or kill time in front of television screens.”Footnote ⁴⁷ He decried the destruction of “Africa’s magnificent wildlife” and how “one species of birds after another, except the very commonest, capitulates before man,” warning that “the day may not be far off when we shall be able to show animals to our grandsons only in picture books or in the zoo.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Edith Eucken-Erdsiek cited Spengler’s warnings that humans will be “overthrown” and “dragged to death” by the might and speed of technological innovation.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, she echoed the general ordoliberal sentiment against determinism, calling Spengler’s “proud skepticism” of technology and the outright refusal to find a solution “snobbery.”Footnote ⁵⁰ She also described Jünger’s “absolute rejection of technology, which escalates almost to hatred,” as “unrealistic romanticism.”Footnote ⁵¹ Though at times harboring romantic views of the past, the ordoliberals did not reject technology outright. It was the prioritization of technological progress and economic efficiency over traditional social values that the ordoliberals took issue with. They maintained that technological development must remain confined within clearly defined social limits—à la taille de l’homme—and unfold at a steady pace.Footnote ⁵²

Eucken and his ordoliberal contemporaries, much like Husserl, warned against Spengler’s fatalistic view of history, regarding this as inclined towards nihilism and as embodying the point of view that it was “foolish to pit oneself against the relentless course of events or to stand up for an idea.”Footnote ⁵³ Röpke went as far as saying that the representatives of the Conservative Revolution, like Spengler, were predecessors of National Socialism.Footnote ⁵⁴ Furthermore, Spengler’s advocacy for a “Prussian state socialism” was starkly different to the ordoliberal framework that emerged a decade later.Footnote ⁵⁵ Spengler advocated for an authoritarian state grounded in Prussian traditions, emphasizing duty, order, and justice over “Western ideals” like freedom and equality.Footnote ⁵⁶

In contrast, although the ordoliberals also exhibited authoritarian tendencies, their vision of the “strong state” was intended, amongst other things, to prevent the centralization of economic power. While the ordoliberals also rejected the pursuit of equality as a “leftist” political objective, they upheld freedom as paramount, advocating the competitive free market as its highest manifestation.Footnote ⁵⁷ For the ordoliberals, freedom stood above all other political values. In their view, attempts to realize material equality first would require coercive state power, while a competitive market order, though never fully egalitarian, would produce the greatest prosperity and an allegedly socially acceptable degree of justice.Footnote ⁵⁸ While they shared with the Conservative Revolutionaries broader anxieties about civilizational decline and its effects on the human relationship with nature, the ordoliberals articulated a distinct response rooted in liberal principles.

Nature as an aesthetic ideal and moral reference

Beyond the practical limitations of Vitalpolitik, ordoliberal environmental critique relied heavily on aesthetic framing and thereby carried distinctly elitist undertones. Röpke in particular lamented the disintegration of modern urban life and the emergence of ugly and large concrete buildings to accommodate an expanding population. He recounted how,

He attributed to modern urban civilization an uncanny power to “destroy all beauty, dignity, harmony, and poetry in its path,” invoking agrarian theorist Ralph Borsodi’s phrase “Ugly Civilization” to capture its essence.Footnote ⁶⁹ For Röpke, the world of “concrete, gasoline, and advertising” was depriving the human spirit of its “essential vitamins of life.”Footnote ⁷⁰ He concluded that “our disregard of nature is matched by our disregard of historical beauty and harmony.”Footnote ⁷¹ Modern urban living consisted of a “rootlessness” and “nomadism,” the complete opposite of romantic ideals of connections to the “homeland” and the soil.Footnote ⁷²

Röpke’s appeal to notions of beauty, dignity, harmony, and poetry reflects a cultural register historically associated with educated elites, for whom the cultivation of aesthetic ideals was attainable, in contrast to the lived realities of working-class urban populations. In framing urban life in terms of “rootlessness” and “nomadism,” Röpke cast modern mass society as culturally and morally deficient, setting up a dichotomy between rooted, tradition-bound communities and the alienation of metropolitan existence. Rüstow also supported this perspective, claiming,

Aspects of their aesthetic environmental critique operated at a deeper level, functioning as a normative benchmark against which their social and cultural critiques were articulated. When Rüstow or Röpke spoke about the nightmarish traffic jams in modern cities, these phenomena were not mere inconveniences but emblematic of a deeper loss of autonomy. This illustrated how mass urbanization imposed systemic constraints on individual freedom, a trajectory that Röpke likened to Hayek’s “road to serfdom.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Eucken outlined how these developments were affecting the emergence of a new type of human being, a “mass product whose existence depends on the state.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This development was understood as a process of Vermassung, massification, which Röpke described as the process in which individuals “are wafted haphazard and mechanically into heaps … devoid of any real inner solidarity and any roots or connection with social standing and milieu, without a genuine sense of community and without leadership on the part of a real and responsible authority standing above the mass.”Footnote ⁷⁶

This fear, closely intertwined with their broader anxiety about “the masses,” formed a central theme in the social criticism of international intellectuals during this period and was widely shared among many neoliberals.Footnote ⁷⁷ The image of the broad “masses” as culturally and intellectually deficient was often entangled with a deep skepticism of their tastes and judgment, giving rise to a profound mistrust of their seemingly increasing political influence.Footnote ⁷⁸ Vitalpolitik thus did not aim at empowering “the masses” but at restoring the spiritual and existential conditions of the individual—implicitly a morally disciplined bourgeois individual embedded in small-scale communities.

For Röpke, societal “recovery” from Vermassung depended upon the reassertion of traditional virtues by elites.Footnote ⁷⁹ He called for a “small but influential group” of leaders, “aristocrats of the common good,” or a nobilitas naturalis, who would uphold inviolable norms and values on behalf of society.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such figures were to embody a “willingly acknowledged authority,” deriving legitimacy from moral example, and an allegedly natural dignity.Footnote ⁸¹ Participation in the moral and political core of society was thus reserved for a cultivated minority, while broader social strata appeared as objects of guidance rather than agents of self-government. The ordoliberal social order thus fostered a highly selective form of community: one grounded in traditional values, implicit class distinctions, and a constrained conception of freedom. Röpke’s green parochial ideal thus offered a normative image of order that failed to engage with the structural complexities of modern mass society and, in doing so, revealed the elitist assumptions embedded in his social vision.

The Cult of the Colossal

Röpke launched an extensive critique against what he termed the “Cult of the Colossal”—a quasi-religious faith in scale and magnitude as intrinsic goods. He characterized this mind-set as a form of worship of the “Great,” the assumption that what is largest is necessarily best and most valuable.Footnote ⁸² This also meant contempt for what is outwardly small but inwardly great, the cult of power and homogeneity, the predilection for the superlative in all spheres of cultural life, even in language.Footnote ⁸³ This materialized in “population increases, imperialism, socialism, mammoth industries, monopolism, statism, monumental architecture, technical dynamism, mass armies, the concentration of state power, giant cities, massification and even Wagner’s operas.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Rüstow similarly lamented that in modern society beauty and success could only be measured by its size: the tallest house is the most beautiful and the biggest industrial plant the best, “even if the house comes tumbling down or the plant goes bankrupt the next one will be still taller, the next bigger than ever.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Müller-Armack also criticized modern society’s obsession with speed, epitomized in the ever-increasing desire for fast cars and planes.Footnote ⁸⁶

Their criticism of the “Cult of the Colossal” also shaped their opposition to monopolies and large corporations, which they viewed as institutional expressions of excessive scale and concentrated power. Writing as early as 1929, Röpke observed that the wasteful exploitation of resources largely occurs in the hands of monopolists.Footnote ⁸⁷ With the increasing centralization of economic power, large industries and monopolies dictated market behavior often to the detriment of nature’s resources. Rüstow detailed how large chemical monopolies contribute to excessive chemicalization of the earth.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this process, he argued that industrial expansion neglected agriculture, soil preservation, and the use of natural fertilizers, thereby causing long-term damage to both farming and soil health.Footnote ⁸⁹

This also underscored their criticism of unbounded economic growth. Indeed, Ralph Ancil, a conservative American economist dedicated to preserving Röpke’s legacy, described Röpke as a conservative de-growther who “would have had little patience for ‘hysterical optimists’ … praising the rising GDP figures and the growth of the global economy.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Although Röpke criticized society’s “growth obsession,” he did not advance an economic program designed to restrain growth; his intervention remained civilizational and cultural rather than programmatic.Footnote ⁹¹ Müller-Armack also emphasized how “economic growth leads to increased environmental pollution, expanding depletion of raw-material reserves, drying up of energy sources, and increasingly explosive population growth.”Footnote ⁹² However, later he clarified that “total environmental design” in which “the performance and growth of the market economy are to be cut … is misguided and utopian.”Footnote ⁹³ Ordoliberal critiques of economic growth were not directed at growth as a structural feature of competitive markets, but at the cultural pathologies associated with elevating growth above all other social goals. What they rejected was not expansion within a functioning market order, but the treatment of quantitative growth as a civilizational end in itself, detached from moral limits and social balance.Footnote ⁹⁴

For the ordoliberals, bigness was not merely a quantitative measure but a qualitative transformation that produced new social pathologies. Large-scale economic units, mass production, and centralized administrative systems were seen as generating anonymity, concentration of power, and moral irresponsibility, precisely because they exceeded the scale at which individual agency, ethical restraint, and social accountability could be maintained. Smallness, by contrast, was treated as a normative ideal: smaller firms, family-based production, and local communities were believed to preserve responsibility and social cohesion.

This moral economy of scale, where “big” signified domination and abstraction and “small” signified order and human measure, structured their broader social critique while also shaping their understanding of nature.Footnote ⁹⁵ Rather than conceiving of the environment in planetary or systemic terms, ordoliberal thinkers tended to imagine nature as something small-scale, local, and immediately perceptible: farms, forests, villages, and landscapes that could serve as moral and social reference points. Their environmental sensibility thus mirrored their social vision: both were grounded in a preference for limited scale and decentralization and both struggled to engage with forms of environmental degradation or social organization that operated at larger, global levels. While conceptions of nature at the time remained largely local, and global environmental thinking only gained prominence in the 1970s, the ordoliberals advanced an especially parochial vision, grounded in a social ideal of small-scale, locally embedded communities that proved increasingly difficult to reconcile with the economic and political realities of the mid-twentieth century.

Switzerland epitomized this ideal, with Röpke citing Bavarian economist Joseph Hofmiller’s claim that it is “no coincidence that the Swiss write such beautiful children’s stories: they aren’t large city dwellers.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Switzerland played a crucial role in Röpke’s civilizational critique, serving as a tangible example that crystallized his theoretical concepts. Röpke argued that liberalism in Switzerland was not imposed but had naturally evolved from the country’s history, culture, and traditions.Footnote ⁹⁷ By framing liberalism as an organic part of Swiss society, he reconciled his rejection of modernity with his embrace of liberalism, viewing it as a natural expression of local values rather than a product of abstract Enlightenment ideals. Röpke idealized the political and economic system developed in Switzerland, with its “strong, independent and well-educated peasantry, its stock of highly trained artisans and small merchants, [and] its decentralized industry.”Footnote ⁹⁸ There was also a pronounced admiration for Swiss culture and ways of life, shaped in part by Röpke’s own experience of living in Switzerland and reinforced by the practice of hosting conferences and societies there, most notably the Mont Pèlerin Society.

This admiration was accompanied by an idealized image of Switzerland, exemplified in Röpke’s glowing portrayal of the Swiss worker who could prepare lunch from his garden, catch his supper from Lake Zurich, and earn a supply of potatoes for the autumn by helping to clear a neighbor’s land.Footnote ⁹⁹ He nostalgically described a small village near Bern, home to about three thousand inhabitants, where he enjoyed spending time in an “enchanting 500 year old inn.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Röpke fawned over the farms, small industries, and “high cultural standards,” praising its “respectable and highly tasteful book shop” and its overall cleanliness and beauty.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He went on to declare that “this village is our ideal translated into a highly concrete reality.”Footnote ¹⁰² Röpke’s romantic detachment from reality is evident in his idealized conception of Switzerland, which was significantly removed from the complexities of its economic structure. As was noted by Swiss commentators themselves, Röpke’s portrayal failed to acknowledge that Switzerland was not merely composed of picturesque mountain communities but included a more nuanced and diverse economic landscape.Footnote ¹⁰³

A framework of hierarchy

For Röpke, Switzerland symbolized tradition and cultural stability, a society where people still knew one another, family farms were preserved, and communal life was not overwhelmed by the anonymous concrete metropolis. He believed that the optimal city contained around fifty thousand to sixty thousand inhabitants, while the ideal farm should not “exceed the working capacity of one family together with … a few additional and often temporary agricultural laborers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He warned about the dangers if this was to be exceeded and believed that a structural policy was necessary to distribute the “size of businesses, the distribution of population between town and country and between industry and agriculture, and also the distinctions between classes.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In this respect, the ordoliberals set themselves apart from other neoliberal strands of thought, which did not call for such extensive structural state intervention in organizing social and economic life.

The ordoliberals also envisioned an active state role in managing population growth, which they treated as a symptom of the “Cult of the Colossal.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Röpke warned that if we do not take action soon the world will transform into an “anthill,” societal hell, with the consequence of complete devastation of nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Rüstow similarly warned that the continuously growing population was transforming the planet into a “rabbit hutch.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To him, the solution was to be found in managing humans rather than managing nature—he believed that stopping population growth was the only way to avert social and environmental collapse. He was therefore a strong advocate for birth control, which, while relatively progressive for the 1950s, carried questionable eugenic implications.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Röpke made the eugenic dimension explicit, targeting those at the bottom of the social pyramid: “more often than not, it is the drunkards and the feeble-minded who have the most children … Clearly, the qualitative and eugenic aspects of population movements must be taken into consideration as well as the merely quantitative aspects.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ A hierarchical mind-set underlay his social views, stating that a “healthy society” exhibits a “necessarily hierarchical composition” where “each individual has the good fortune of knowing his position.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Similarly, in a letter to Eucken, Rüstow lamented society’s “lack of organic hierarchical structure,” a concern that Eucken had also highlighted in his own work.Footnote ¹¹² This biopolitical focus on population control, especially targeting those considered socially and biologically inferior, constituted the biological radicalization of the elitist logic embedded in their broader social vision.

As Quinn Slobodian has documented, Röpke’s hierarchical social order also extended into his views on race.Footnote ¹¹³ Röpke regarded people from the global South as lazy at best, and as barbarians at worst.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In his essay South Africa: An Attempt at Positive Appraisal (1964), he supported apartheid and made blatantly racist claims about the supposed differences between “Westerners” and “backward” peoples from Africa and South Asia.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Slobodian interprets Röpke’s racial hierarchy as a formal strategy of rule; “some populations, he [Röpke] argued, had the traits required for success in a system of global capitalism, others did not—and little could change this fact.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This biological essentialism was woven into Röpke’s vitalist ideas about life forces and natural order, reinforcing the notion that certain groups were inherently suited to thrive within specific ecological and economic contexts. It echoed the perspectives of racist eugenic conservationist who framed twentieth-century decline as a dual threat: “race suicide on the cultural level and an environmental wasteland on the other.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Rüstow also engaged with racial theorists and regarded race theory—when presented as “scientifically” grounded—as a legitimate source of anthropological knowledge.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Racist and colonial-apologist contributions continued to appear in ORDO well into the 1970s.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Some advanced a colonial-apologist interpretation of global economic relations, portraying Western companies’ extraction of natural resources in the global South as a stabilizing force that generated employment and fostered trust.Footnote ¹²⁰ Others advocated birth control measures in the global South, framing demographic regulation as a prerequisite for economic development, while others still advocated state-led initiatives to raise birth rates in the global North.Footnote ¹²¹ More broadly, many ordoliberals emphasized the primacy of “Western” and European civilization, treating it as the normative benchmark against which other societies were implicitly measured.Footnote ¹²² This reflected not merely an organicist social imaginary, but a hierarchical social framework which sought to naturalize civilizational and demographic inequalities.

This hierarchical framework likewise structured their understanding of women’s role within their social order.Footnote ¹²³ Rüstow described gardening as “without a doubt a female invention,” using it as an analogy to cast women as the natural custodians of both cultivated landscapes and the domestic sphere.Footnote ¹²⁴ Ordoliberals treated the patriarchal family as the center of their social framework, and thus vital to the maintenance of a civilized liberal order.Footnote ¹²⁵ Rüstow outlined how the “well-ordered” house was the foundation of a civilized and happy society; it was “the natural sphere of the woman” and young women should be educated on how to be good “spouses, housewives and mothers.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The ordoliberal opposition to the welfare state was thus articulated not only as an economic and social critique of collectivism, but also as one infused with conservative and gendered assumptions about the proper ordering of family and society. In this view, the expansion of the welfare state threatened to displace forms of care that were understood as women’s natural responsibility within the household.Footnote ¹²⁷

“Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin”

Röpke envisioned domestic life unfolding largely in the garden and argued that children living in cities should attend school only in the mornings, leaving their afternoons free to spend time outdoors, appreciate nature, and cultivate family life.Footnote ¹²⁸ Rüstow outlined how the garden was one of the most important foci of Vitalpolitik.Footnote ¹²⁹ For the ordoliberals, gardens also played an important role as a spiritual retreat from the dangers of modern civilization. Rüstow explored how industrial workers of Western Europe, “driven by instinctive self-help, managed to have a suburban garden, however small and mean,” which to him was “nothing more than the attempt, undertaken at a small cost, to return, at least to some extent, to the ‘vital situation’ of the peasant.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Röpke frequently cited Voltaire’s phrase “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin,” as well as Francis Bacon’s statement that the garden is “the purest of human pleasures,” to express his fondness for them.Footnote ¹³¹ In a similar vein, Müller-Armack argued for a new Bodenverbundenheit in modern society through an uptake in gardening.Footnote ¹³² Rüstow also frequently mentioned the importance of the garden in modern society, imploring that “this beautiful earth could be a garden for all mankind.”Footnote ¹³³ The significance they attributed to gardens further underscores the vitalist dimension of their thought: gardens represented a model of mediated harmony between human intervention and natural vitality, balancing order with organic growth.

This idealization of the garden further reinforced the elitist dimensions of their thought, particularly in light of the European tradition of the landscape garden as a cultural form that staged and legitimized aristocratic authority.Footnote ¹³⁴ The metaphor of the garden establishes a stark dichotomy between the well-ordered “garden of European civilization” and, in Röpke’s words, a “rank jungle of thought and style run wild.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Such imagery not only reveals a civilizational hierarchy but also encodes a vision of social order grounded in exclusion and control. Röpke’s discussion of the garden can thus be read as an allegory for his social utopia, one that envisaged a perfectly cultivated, homogeneous population rooted in traditional Western values and organized within tightly regulated small communities.Footnote ¹³⁶ In this sense, the garden metaphor operated as both aesthetic ideal and political program, naturalizing hierarchy and legitimizing cultural uniformity in the guise of organic order.

The garden metaphor functioned not only within their social framework but also in their conception of economic order, linking the two and expressing their view of the market as a cultivated and carefully ordered system. Rüstow used the garden metaphor to demonstrate the importance of private property, citing a folk song which claims, “what good is a beautiful garden if others can walk in it.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Röpke made similar claims that “even the largest public park cannot take the place of the smallest privately possessed garden.”Footnote ¹³⁸ He continued that growing food in your garden was a “happy and purposeful activity without the string of money grubbing and recreation” for which one would otherwise have “to dip” into one's “pocket.”Footnote ¹³⁹ He observed how “peasant holdings … bring men and nature together … proximity to nature, moderation and tranquility, a natural and full existence near the sources of life, and a humble integration into the chain of birth and death.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Röpke argued that “the masses” had been “torn away from the anchor of property,” leading property to lose its normative significance as a valued and stabilizing institution.Footnote ¹⁴¹

For the ordoliberals, small-scale property was a vector of independence, freedom, and individuality, because it offered everyone the means to exercise their potential as well as a degree of independence essential to cope with the negative effects of the market economy.Footnote ¹⁴² Therefore, as Müller-Armack put it, ordoliberal social policy did not aim to “redistribute wealth” but to establish a connection between the “human beings and private property.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Rather than necessitating a welfare state, society would be equipped with the tools to organize and sustain itself. In this sense, property ownership was not merely an economic arrangement but a civilizational one, a means of anchoring individuals within a stable social order and cultivating the very qualities that Vitalpolitik sought to foster. The smallholder, the craftsman, the homeowner: these were not incidental figures but the normative ideal around which ordoliberal social thought was organized, and against which the anonymous mass of the wage-dependent proletariat appeared as a pathology to be corrected.