Introduction and OverviewThe Freiburg or Ordo-liberal School was a group of economists and lawyers, above all the group around Walter Eucken (1891-1950) and Franz Böhm (1895-1977, that investigated the question of how the institutional infrastructure of a workable market economy should be organized. The characteristics of this group were a neo-liberal attitude and the striving for an economic policy which forms an integrated whole, and which is led by principles. The Ordo-typical thinking in economic as well as in legal terms resulted in planning the legal framework for an economy on the basis of its economic requirements for functioning (For a history of the founding of the Ordo-liberal school, see Grossekettler ( 1989)).The Ordo-liberal School, which started publishing in 1936 (Grossekettler, 1989, p. 41), had a great deal of influence on the building of the old Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War, but it lost this influence to a considerable extent in the mid-1960s, when the market economy had been established, and when the mainly Anglo-Saxon-shaped literature had taken over. Nowadays, we find ourselves again in a "situation of foundation" in Germany because the new federal states have to be integrated. An enormous economic experiment is going on. Connected with this situation, many ideas of the Freiburg School have once again gained remarkable prominence, and I have noticed the following interesting facts: q Members of our administration, especially those in the ministries of economics and finance, emphasize that economic textbooks are of very little worth for them in this special situation. They express, on the other hand, that the knowledge of the 1950s, shaped by representatives of the Freiburg School, are of considerable use to them.q Many well-known German economists have proved to be not only politically unworldly, but also to be pure theorists, who act in an institutional nirvana when they advised our politicians, for instance, to carry out the integration of the new federal states gradually, and to make the integration safe via the exchange rate mechanism. You should simply try to imagine which measures would have been necessary to avoid intra-German migration if such a policy had been carried out, which additional risks would have affected investors, and
