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The material assembled in this volume offers a deeper insight into Walter Eucken's attitudes, thought, and actions during the darkest years of Germany's history: the period of National Socialism. Although Eucken, like his associates, destroyed potentially incriminating documents after the failed assassination attempt by Count Stauffenberg on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, the surviving texts mark key stages in a process that ultimately led this determined opponent of the Nazi regime - an opponent from the very beginning - into active resistance against Hitler.
What rendered Eucken immune to National Socialism from the outset was his philosophically grounded abhorrence of the dissolution of the free individual into the collective, as is inherent in all totalitarian, especially voelkisch (ethno-nationalist) ideologies. His systematic opposition to the Nazi regime began with refusal, open protest, and confrontation, particularly in response to the rapid Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of the universities, Martin Heidegger's rectorship, and the dismantling of academic freedom by the Nazis. Following Germany's invasion of Poland and several ultimately unsuccessful attempts to exert positive influence on the centers of power in Berlin, his resistance culminated in a - necessarily cautious - participation in conspiratorial activities as an advisor and confidant to the plotters.
The texts in this volume include notes and sketches of ideas, completed manuscripts that remained unpublished during his lifetime, published essays, a transcript of the lecture "Kampf der Wissenschaften," the record of a public discussion with a Nazi district leader, an expert report commissioned by the Reich Ministry of Economics on possible "sources of war financing" at the end of 1939, the academically significant essay "Wettbewerb als Grundprinzip der Wirtschaftsverfassung" prepared within the Academy for German Law, the chapter Eucken authored for the "Primer of Economics" initiated by Carl Goerdeler, as well as the appendix he co-authored to the memorandum "Wirtschafts- und Sozialordnung" of the Bonhoeffer Circle. This memorandum was prepared on behalf of the Confessing Church with a view to a future world church conference planned for the time after the war and the hoped-for overthrow of Hitler. Retrospective additions include, among other things, Eucken's "Notizen ueber die Haltung der rechts- und staatswissenschaftlichen Fakultaet in Freiburg waehrend der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus," his funeral oration for his prematurely deceased colleague Adolf Lampe, and drafts for an obituary of Hans Grossmann-Doerth, with whom, together with Franz Boehm, Eucken had launched the research program of the Freiburg School: the development of a legal order conceived as an economic constitution, whose fundamental principle would be competition.
These materials make it possible to trace how Eucken, precisely through his confrontation with the rapidly escalating regime of injustice - with the enforced Gleichschaltung, the increasing move toward a planned economy, the persecution of the Jews culminating in genocide, the other atrocities of the dictatorship, and the devastating Second World War - was able to sharpen his conception of a "humane and functional order," diametrically opposed to such a cataclysm. Eucken's theoretical design of a competitive order would later provide direction in the postwar years for the establishment of a social market economy in the young Federal Republic of Germany.