Autonomy and German Traditions of Liberalism

Abstract

’Market democracy, in its silent precision surpasses the most perfect political democracy’. This key statement by one of the intellectual fathers of German ordo-liberalism, Wilhelm Ropke,1 expresses in a very obvious way the fundamental ambivalence within liberal intellectual traditions towards ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as social phenomena. The power to act as a free economic agent, to produce, buy and sell in a market driven by supply and demand, is presented by Ropke as more ‘democratic’ than the power to elect political representatives and hold them answerable. There is a greater ‘equality’ for Ropke in the aggregate of market decisions, because all economic agents are involved all of the time, whereas elections are sporadic, electoral majorities leave sizeable minorities unrepresented and political processes of influence and decision-making are haphazard. It follows that market ‘freedom’ must be the core measure of a culture’s democratic credentials, supported to a greater or lesser degree by the ‘less precise’ institutions of political democracy. This ambivalence as to what constitutes true liberal democracy is by no means confined to the idiosyncratic German tradition of liberalism but is shared by early British exponents of liberalism from Hobbes through to the younger Mill, indeed by modern exponents of ‘neo-liberalism’. The ambivalence derives from differing perceptions of the central theoretical concepts of liberalism, namely of liberty, equality and property and from associated problems of defining the role of the state as a social institution in the framework of an ideology directed towards the individual.