[review of] Conservative Liberalism, Ordo-liberalism, and the State” by Kenneth Dyson

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Who needs to be reminded how turbulent and violent the first decades of the 20th century were? The local wars that then took place, the terrible massacre that was World War I, the two revolutions (in Russia and Germany) that would directly or indirectly dramatically change the face of the world, the economic crisis in Germany in the early 1920s or the 1929 worldwide economic crisis that was (at least partly) responsible of the second major war of the twentieth century. These events obviously affected everyone who lived through them. Some came to think that capitalism had to be abandoned. Others that it should only be reformed. Among the latter were some liberal thinkers convinced that these events were the “symptoms” of an “existential crisis in liberalism”, not a crisis of liberalism (Dyson, 2, 41, 45, 47). It was not liberalism that was at fault, but what it had become, a “crony capitalism” based on unregulated competition, weak governments playing as little role as possible or intervening without rigour or discipline. To exit the crisis and offer new perspectives to traumatised individuals, it was urgent, vital indeed, to invent a new form of liberalism that would “offer a moral purpose, one that promise[d] a more prosperous, secure, and humane society, and a more worthwhile life, than its alternatives like laissez-faire liberalism and social liberalism” (3). Neoliberalism—as it was called at the Lippmann Colloquium in 1938—was born. Its “most systematic, coherent and developed” form took the name and shape of Ordo-liberalism.