In: Critical Review, 1-21
The German Wirtschaftswunder was not the result of economic expertise applied by Ludwig Erhard to postwar West Germany. There is no universally applicable theory-cum-practice of a “social market economy.” A capitalist economy is a political economy that requires an – always fragile – political settlement between capital and labour, one that needs to be re-negotiated on a current basis in the light of changing relations of power between the classes. To the extent that this requires expertise, it is the expertise of political practitioners, not of economists.“The economy” is not a second nature but a social battlefield..
François Godard’s book Germany, France, and Postwar Democratic Capitalims: Expert Rule – based upon his doctoral dissertation at the University of Geneva – could not be more ambitious: a history of post-1945 economic policy, indeed political-economic state-building, or democracy-building, in the two largest West European countries, Germany and France, complemented by two shadow cases, the UK and Italy, stretching out over nearly three decades. What we have here is, in short, high-grade historical institutionalism, driven by a dual program: empirically-historically, to show that West European postwar prosperity was owed, not to political compromise between capital and labor, but to states and governments applying expert knowledge on the economy to the economy; and theoretically-paradigmatically, to suggest that what counts in the world of democratic capitalism, and presumably not just there, are expert ideas, or “ideational models,” adopted and realized by government, rather than economic interests or the deals struck with and between them. (…)
Wolfgang Streeck 