You have full access to this open access article. It provides opening remarks and a brief overview of the individual articles. Ordoliberalism emerged as a program to study the impact of rule-guided economic policy for economic outcomes. Buchanan, a student of Knight and Simons, would later also acknowledge that the Old Chicago School and the Freiburg School of Economics were close relatives see his talk at the Summer Institute and Buchanan, Both programs have recently been at the centre of controversial public debates.
Nancy MacLean attacked public choice by accusing Buchanan and his research group of planning a revolution to overthrow American democracy.
The papers presented in this special issue rebut such accusations on multiple grounds. Given that the Freiburg School preceded the Virginia School by more than two decades, we consider what the latter can learn from the former.
In the first paper of this special issue, Lars P. Feld and Ekkehard A. They argue that the German approach failed to keep up with key methodological developments in academic economics.
Peter J. Boettke and M. Scott King highlight some of the less obvious features of the constitutional political economy approach. Although ordoliberalism and constitutional economics emphasize the importance of rules, it is often unclear what these rules actually are. Alan Hamlin observes that constitutional political economy is usually not very explicit about the nature and definition of rules.
