A survey of Bohm’s life and work
Franz Bohm was born in Konstanz, in Baden, on 16 February 1895, the son of a jurist who was later to become the Badenese Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs. He passed the school-leaving examination in 1913, and after serving in the war he studied law in Freiburg.
In 1922 and 1924 he passed the two examinations that German law students are required to take in order to complete their legal education. He then became a public prosecutor in Freiburg. As early as 1925, however, he moved to the Reich Ministry for Economics, where he was put in charge of the antitrust enforcement department. While he was employed there he worked on his doctoral thesis about the conflict between monopolists and outsiders.The dissertation was supervised by Heinrich Hoeniger, a professor of law, and completed in 1931. Bohm then wrote a post-doctoral thesis which was appraised by Hans Grossmann-Doerth, a jurist, and by Walter Eucken, a well- known economist. The two theses were published together in a book entitled Wettbewerb undMonopolkampf (Competition and the struggle for monopoly) (Bohm, 1933).
In order to become a professor at a German university, it is usual to gain a doctorate (Promotion) and qualify as a lecturer (Habilitation), and generally the professorship must be offered by a different university from the one where the scholar qualified. In 1937 Bohm was offered a chair at the University of Jena, but he worked there for only a short time before being dismissed by the National Socialists after protesting against the treatment meted out to Jews.
During his Freiburg period, he had founded, together with Eucken and Grossmann-Doerth, a series entitled Die Ordnung der Wirtschaft als geschichtliche Aufgabe und rechtsschopferische Leistung (Economic order as a historical task and a law-creating achievement). In this series he published a book with the same title (Bohm, 1937).
The new series brought into being the Freiburg school of thought which was profoundly influenced by Bohm and Eucken, and which is now regarded as the most important branch of the German neoliberal movement known as ‘OrdoliberalismusL Since Germany’s neoliberal economists cooperated with the anti-Hitlerian resistance movement during the Second World War, the Freiburg school remained untainted by Nazism. For this and other reasons, the German neoliberals became highly influential during the post-war period and laid the theoretical foundations for the institutional framework of the German economy - the economic system known as the ‘social market economy’ (Grossekettler, 1997). From the late 1960s onward, however, this institutional order was overlaid by welfarist influences and consequently lost much of its original neoliberal (ordoliberal) character.Neoliberal ideas continued to hold sway over the social market economy until the mid-1960s, and this was due in large measure to the fact that Bohm himself worked resolutely to refine and elaborate the theories expounded by the Freiburg school. In 1945 he was appointed professor at the University of Freiburg, and shortly afterwards he became Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs in what is now the federal state of Hessen. He then took up a chair at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1962. In 1952, he conducted the reparation negotiations with Israel and did what he could to secure the most generous settlement possible. From 1953 until 1965 he was a CDU1 member of the Bundestag, and as a member of parliament he was one of the fathers of the German antitrust law (Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschrankungen). Until his death on 26 September 1977, he was also a member of the Academic Advisory Board (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat) in the Federal Ministry for Economics and co-editor of the yearbook ORDO, the organ of the German neoliberals. Throughout his academic career, he sought to attain two objectives: (i) to translate into juridical parlance economic proposals for an institutional order as a framework for economic processes, and (ii) to combat every kind of economic power and the conversion of such power into political influence. Tribute was paid to Bohm’s work in a special issue of the European Journal of Law and Economics (vol. 3, no. 4/1996). This publication contains, among other things, references to Bohm’s life, a list of his books and his contributions to learned journals and collaborative volumes, and the titles of the Festschriften and symposia that were devoted to him.