Alexander Rüstow

Alexander Rüstow (1885 to 1963) was a German sociologist and economist who popularised the term neoliberalism at the Colloque Walter Lippmann in August 1938 and became one of the fathers of the Social Market Economy that shaped West Germany after the Second World War. Born in Wiesbaden, he studied mathematics, physics, philosophy, philology, law and economics at Göttingen, Munich and Berlin and took his doctorate at Erlangen in 1908 on Russell's paradox. Still a socialist after the First World War, he grew disillusioned with socialist planning, was blacklisted in 1933 and fled to Switzerland, then held a chair in economic geography and history at the University of Istanbul, where he wrote Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, published in English as Freedom and Domination, a three volume critique of civilization. With Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke and Franz Böhm he provided the foundational work of Ordoliberalism, and from 1949 he held a chair at the University of Heidelberg until his retirement in 1956.