Alexander Rüstow analyzed the reasons for the failure of economic liberalism as early as the 1940s. It is not an unavoidable "dialectic of enlightenment" that leads to the freedom-restraining consequences of economic liberalism, but rather the pre-modern remnants that have been carried along in modern economic thought since Adam Smith. Rüstow counters the fragmented enlightenment with a further development of enlightenment, which he unfolds in this book into a concrete concept against economic power and social inequality. Alexander Rüstow is one of the most significant sociologists of the twentieth century in Germany. The co-founder of Ordoliberalism had to emigrate from Nazi Germany. Since 1948, he has been recognized as one of the key thinkers of the economic and social order of the Federal Republic.