The four articles that constitute this minisymposium reconstruct the politico-economic discourses of Walter Eucken (1891–1950), Henry C. Simons (1899–1946), Jan Tinbergen (1903–94), and Ludwig M. Lachmann (1906–90). Similar to the “worldly philosophers” in Robert Heilbroner's best seller, these four “orderly economists” were system builders who analyzed their time and also provided visions of what political economy could achieve, particularly during the fragile interwar and early postwar decades on both sides of the Atlantic. The unifying theme in the four articles is the emphasis on the notion of order as the primary element of politico-economic theorizing and the role of the political economist, especially in normative debates about orders of economy and society. The minisymposium also connects to a renewed interest within several communities in the history of the social sciences about the topicality of order-based political economy amid the increasingly fragile orders in Western democracies today.
The editor of the...
