The policy relevance of 'Three Waves': why should we care today about the history of ordoliberalism and social markets in Britain?

11 August 2026

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog but, on the occasion of my new publication, ‘Three Waves of Social Markets’ in Contemporary European History, I wanted to expand a bit on what I think are the contemporary ramifications of the article. Historically, I avoided the contemporary policy application of my research, and I still try to avoid it in my articles themselves, but it has become more present in how think about and discuss the articles. This article was conceptualised in relation to contemporary debates and my think has evolved through the period of peer review so I think it is worth exploring. I’m planning to also write a post on the writing of the article, my first as an independent scholar, and what comes next but that will be a separate post.

As a relatively short blog I will identify four applications of the article to contemporary analysis: the Renewal essay, opinion columns on ordoliberalism, personal trajectories and the IPPR project on citizenship (which I find most exciting). These don’t hang together particularly well, but they aren’t incoherent.

To flag from the outset, I developed this article alongside my essay for Renewal, which discusses the ‘first wave’ as a framing for critical engagement with proposals from the left for economic and industrial democracy. I think the CEH article adds additional ammo to the argument in the Renewal essay, demonstrating how elements of the Thatcherite worldview, including ordoliberal elements, were adopted by social democrats trying to resist Thatcherism, using the language of ordoliberalism to articulate their critiques. Part of the motivation of the article is to express caution about accepting the ordoliberal solution to Anglo-American neoliberalism, as this is nonetheless capitulation to neoliberal thinking and policy. I’ll express some qualification here, perhaps ordoliberalism has insights on antitrust, the relationship between the state and markets in contemporary capitalism, the risks of disembedded capitalism, etc. (this forms part of my future plan for research on this topic) but these shouldn’t be accepted uncritically, other intellectual projects also have analyses of these issues.

The Renewal essay was my primary applied think when writing the article but I was also thinking about articles recommending ordoliberalism for Britain. This is something of a personal bugbear for me, but there seems to be perennial article in the British press, proposing ordoliberalism or social markets as a solution to British politics. See prime examples here (Ed Miliband is an ordoliberal) and here (Keir Starmer is an ordoliberal). This always does my head in, as it rarely shows deeper understanding of ordoliberalism or social markets in practice or their history nor does it show understanding that these arguments have been made for 70+ years now. If ordoliberalism was such an obvious answer, why had it not worked in all the attempts so far. The article was thus intended to have something to contribute to this discussion.

In writing the article, I got something of an answer to this question, which is how poor understanding and engagement with ordoliberalism can be, even by those who advocate for it. Robert Ledger has does quite good historical and political analysis in his books, but I was really surprised to read his characterisation of social markets and ordoliberalism as effectively as cuddly and sanded down neoliberalism, shorn of the nasty bits and prioritising socially beneficial outcomes. This really misses the arguments of ordoliberals themselves or the real policy history of ordoliberalism in Germany and Europe. Similar mistakes bedevil the political actors, notably David Owen’s claim that social markets are from the SPD, Maurice Glasman who claims they have nothing to do with ordoliberalism, and their recurrent ‘discovery’ in British politics. British politics and political history have a tendency to parochialism and engaging with actual German politics and German history, beyond just asking your one mate to explain something to you, actually going out and reading the sources, might be clarifying.

The third application is on personal trajectories, something I vague-posted a bit about while writing the article. There’s a curious cohort in the key advocates I identified for social markets in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Will Hutton, Robert Skidelsky, David Goodhart, Maurice Glasman, and David Willetts. While writing the article, all five were still alive and engaging in contemporary politics. When initially writing on social markets, all except Willetts were identified as social democrats or of the Left and subsequently all except Hutton have ended up on the Right. There’s also a tendency to scandal, whether that is Glasman’s support for MAGA and Steve Bannon, Goodhart’s turn to ethnonationalism (latent in the ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’, but now explicit), in Skidelsky’s dodgy business with Russia. I used to have a few sentences in the article mentioning the trajectories of these actors but was tight on word count and felt it distracted somewhat from the argument. It does leave the framing of ‘three waves’ potentially in jeopardy if a fourth wave may have begun sometime in the 21st century. However, these personal trajectories should give us pause about embracing these ideas as compatible with a progressive form of social democracy. What is it about ordoliberalism that appeals to reactionaries and racists?

The final thought was crystalised by recent publications in the IPPR’s Decade of National Renewal programme, which are well worth reading, especially a recent one on Citizenship. This fits with an element of the article that emerged through peer review. Originally the article’s third wave ‘Labour and the 90s’ identified a few engagements with social markets in Labour-aligned publications but concluded that Hutton and others’ proposals for a stakeholder economy didn’t really get anywhere with Blair, similarly to Thatcherism dropping social markets by 1979. However, one of my reviewers encourages me to look further at the social inclusion/exclusion and citizenship literature, presumably because Levitas presents this as coming from Hutton’s stakeholder analysis.

This suggestion helped unlock the case study for me. Existing literature has linked stakeholding to social inclusion and citizenship through notions of embedded capitalism. Stakeholding relies on a sense that capitalism should be embedded and that we should look to disembedded firms and more firmly embed them. Social exclusion shifted the emphasis from criticising structures like capitalism to criticising people like workers who were disembedded in the economy. People who don’t hold and invest capital or who don’t participate in labour markets are here blameworthy for their deprivation as they are insufficiently participating in society. Compelling their engagement in the economy is also a way of fixing them and society. There are discursive continuities with the ordoliberal stuff I discussed in the article both the logics of ordoliberalism and their manifestations in British political discourse. I was also fascinated to read Levitas noting that Labour’s social exclusion approach reminded her not of socialism or social democracy but rather of continental Christian democracy and David Byrne identifying similarities with the logics of German ‘order liberals’. Here my article made the connections and established a missing genealogy in the literature. It was also surprising to return to some of the readings on the ‘the underclass’ that I had read for my article on Lynn and the New Right. As Keith Joseph and his moral economy are important in both articles, perhaps this should not have been so surprising, but it was useful to make these overlaps more explicit.

These were in my head when I began reading the IPPR reports a few weeks ago. I was already primed to find the IPPR interesting for the article for two reasons. The first is genealogical for social markets. The IPPR was an important actor in the networks of the Labour Party in the third wave, helping inform Goodhart, Marquand and Hutton on social markets, which is definitely an institutional link I want to explore more – David Miliband looks to be important here. As the IPPR has institutional history with the ideas I’m working with perhaps its unsurprising they return to them. The second reason was the genealogy of my article. In understanding the SDP and Labour, I drew in part on the work of Nick Garland and had brief correspondence with him on ideas and sources (don't blame Nick for any of shortcomings of my article, those are solely my responsibility, he only helped it be better). Nick is one of the authors at the IPPR on this project, which does draw in part on his research. As there is shared genealogy, understandably there might be some similarities in analysis.

What I find so interesting about the IPPR report is the attempt to return to the citizenship debates of the 1990s and with it this ordoliberal influenced policy discourse. Here there are a number of shared diagnoses of the problem. Contemporary capitalism isn’t working for people, concentrations of capital and power are problematic for the economy and society, the state has stepped out of its role in creating the conditions for the economy and society. Here I worried, we were in for a rehash of the failed and reactionary elements of the 90s. However, this was subverted. With idea of democratic citizenship and reciprocity, the authors look to push beyond (ordo)liberal intellectual horizons and to instead pursue a social democratic alternative. We still see a need for antitrust and forms of embedding, but these differ from centring capital and capitalist logics. Where the 1990s exhibit a failure to imagine alternatives to neoliberalism, this project seems to directly want to grapple with that question.

In writing the article I had begun to question the idea of alternatives. To suggest more of my ideas for future work, I had been playing with ideas in contemporary scholarship that ordoliberalism is descriptively (not necessarily normatively) correct in its analysis of contemporary liberal governance. This analysis suggests that the third wave was less a failure of imagination or capitulation by socialists and social democrats than a recognition of structural transformations of the state and capitalism. What I’m excited about by the IPPR reports is reopening the question of contingency and possibility. If it is indeed possible to think beyond the blinkers of the 1990s to present then our abilities to contextualise and critique these worldviews and policy regimes are still important.