Protestant Economic Ethics and social market economy Connection and connection lines 1937-1954

Using the "Evangelisches Soziallexikon" and its editor Friedrich Karrenberg as an example, this study shows that based on the anthropology influenced by the Reformation the concept of the social market economy developed when economic liberalism encountered civil social reform. Reinhold Niebuhr's "Christian realism" had a wide influence on Protestant economists such as Friedrich Karrenberg, Constantin von Dietze or Alfred Müller-Armack. Against this backdrop, the concept of the social market economy of the 1950s must be understood more precisely as sociological liberalism. © Mohr Siebeck.