The Freiburg school and the Hayekian challenge

At first sight and in terms of explicit references, the relationship between Hayek and the early Freiburg School seems to have been one of mutually benign neglect. It took several decades before the “Hayekian challenge” was fully understood in Freiburg; in a way one could even argue that the challenge arrived in Freiburg only with Hayek himself in 1962. This delay can mostly be explained by different foci of attention. Hayek’s evolutionary economics and his classical-liberal social philosophy centers around the problem of private, dispersed knowledge. The (early) Freiburg School’s economics and its ordo-liberal social philosophy centers around the problem of private, concentrated power. This difference of perspective has consequences and can partly be explained by the different intellectual sources the proponents were drawing upon, and the different political struggles they were engaged in.