Award ceremony for the Alfred Müller-Armack Medal of Merit to Dr. Walter Oswalt May 06, 2018, in Frankfurt Main

The Alliance for the Social Market Economy is honored to award the Alfred Müller-Armack Medal of Merit to
Dr. Walter Oswalt as an appreciation for his extensive work about the fundamentals of the Social Market Economy and for his commitment to the Walter Eucken-Edition.

At the award ceremony for Professor Dr. Hasse in November, the participants commemorated
Dr. Walter Oswalt.
  Photo Gallery
  Event Report as PDF-Download


Awardee Dr. Walter Oswalt
was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1959. Being part of different environmental groups, he engaged in politics early on. The trained gardener was a member of the first Green faction in the Frankfurt Römer from 1981 to 1985. Thereafter, he worked as a free journalist and studied philosophy in Vienna. He got to know Karl Popper, whose seminars strongly influenced him.

He received his doctoral degree with the thesis “The Tradition of disempowerment. Strong liberalism in middle-class revolutions” in 1997. The important theatre and opera director Adolf Dresen, who had been expelled from the DDR, convinced of the idea that the prevailing economic order can be criticized the hardest from a liberal perspective.

This made Oswalt study the work of his grandfather Walter Eucken and other ordoliberals. He dealt with the history of ideas of liberalism in numerous monographies, editions, essays and reports. Thereby, he introduced the ideas of ordoliberalism in political and social debates and groups, of which some were far away from ordoliberal positions.

Oswalt oversees the development of the legacy of his grandfather, Walter Eucken. The university and state library Jena began developing an archive in 2013. He significantly contributed to the preparation of the Walter-Eucken-Edition, which is going to be published by the publisher Mohr Siebeck in 2020.

After a long and serious disease, Walter Oswalt passed away on June 23, 2018 at the age of 58. The Alliance for the Social Market Economy will keep him in best memory .