Christian Watrin. On the fifth anniversary
of his death (July 29, 1930 – Dec. 1, 2020)

It is late autumn 2025, and lest we forget that Christian Watrin, one of Germany’s most profound scholars, died in Cologne 5 years ago. Watrin belonged to that irreplaceable generation of European academics whose work arose and developed from a comprehensive approach to various disciplines that condition and influence one another. As the author of important works and as a brilliant and highly respected teacher, he has inspired countless colleagues and students. Had eminent figures such as Smith, Menger, v. Mises, v. Hayek, Erhard or Buchanan shaped the theoretical basis of free market economics before him, Watrin arguably contributed more to the broader understanding of the concept and the operational foundation of the ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’ in Germany.

I

The melody of his spoken language as well as his most pleasant and charming personality gave Watrin away as a native of Rhineland- Westphalia where he grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. During his studies of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Cologne, Alfred Mueller-Armack’s attention was drawn to the unusual talents of his student and made Watrin his academic assistant. This affiliation proved formative. Mention should be made that Alfred Mueller-Armack (1901-1978) and Ludwig Erhard (1897-1977) were the two leading scholars of the theoretical foundations to and the build-up of the so-called German Economic Miracle.

In 1963, less than a year after Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899-1992) has moved from the University of Chicago and accepted a professorship at the renown Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg/Br. Freiburg, Watrin started there in the position of a temporary substitute. Both scholars soon developed a fruitful academic and personal relationship that sparked Watrin’s lasting interest in and dedication to Austrian Economics. At F.A. von Hayek’s 80 th birthday celebration in 1978, Watrin commended the Nobel laureate and his seminal work in a most insightful, poignant and stimulating lecture.

However in 1965 Watrin moved back to the more northern part of Germany and accepted his first full professorship at the Ruhr University in Bochum. However, after only 2 years he returned to his Alma Mater, the University of Cologne in order to assume there the Chair of the Department of Economics and also served as director of the Institute of Economic Policy for some 25 years. During his directorship the journal was considered the leading academic outlet of liberal (European sense) thought. Thus, Watrin came back full circle from being Mueller-Armack’s favorable student, to becoming his assistant and eventually his successor. He crowned his devotion to his teacher with the publication of “Widersprüche der Kapitalismuskritik: Festschrift zum 75. Geburtstag von A. Mueller-Armack in 1976. Several guest professorships made Watrin’s teaching talents evident at various leading universities, among them Georgetown and Princeton in the US, Oxford in the UK or Vienna in Austria. In 1995 the University of Cologne promoted him to professor emeritus status.

II

During the tense years between 1987 and 1992, while the world witnessed the collapse of the oppressive regimes in the GDR and most other Soviet dominated states, Watrin chaired the Academic Advisory Board at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs in Bonn. These dramatic years not only dangerously revealed Socialism’s inherent theoretical contradictions and agonizing practical shortcomings. These tumultuous events ultimately led to the unification of both German states. For his competent, discerning yet decisive leadership, Watrin was awarded the German Bundeverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit). To honor his 70 th birthday, an academic Festschrift “Vordenker einer neuen Wirtschaftspolitik: Marktwirtschaft, Individualismus und Ideengeschichte”, was published in Frankfurt/M in 2000. In the fall of the same year, the board of the Mont Pelerin Society (founded by F.A. von Hayek in 1947), elected Watrin as president at its general meeting in Chile in 2000. He served this distinguished group of world leading scholars during the first two years of the new Millennium. His predecessors in this office included, besides Friedrich A. von Hayek, great economists such as Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Herbert Giersch, Antonio Martino or George Stigler. In order to spread the ideas of the ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’ and to keep Hayek’s work alive, he was supported by a number of eminent scholars, entrepreneurs and publishers in establishing the German ‘Friedrich A. von Hayek Gesellschaft’. Watrin served as its first president until 2006 and was honored with the prestigious ‘F.A. von Hayek Medaille’ the same year.

III

Straight forward and much to the point in his analyses, Christian Watrin was a most inspiring academic teacher endowed with the sheer inexhaustible knowledge of a highly cultured scholar. As one of Europe’s leading and outspoken protagonists of the ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’, he decisively helped shape the German and European socio-economic policies from the 1970s to the 1990s. Firmly grounded in the principles of Austrian Economics, yet always carefully weighing the pros and cons, he honestly confronted the utopian ideas of mainstream economics with the social and economic approach based on property rights, contracts, self-responsibility and free markets. Accordingly, for Watrin, the main purpose of politics was the finding and ultimately also enforcing of rules that enable men with different value convictions to live freely together and thus to limit government actions. Moreover, Watrin maintained that the most profound error of the Welfare State’s ideology is the precarious misunderstanding of the equal treatment principle that must ultimately lead to the destruction of morals and ethics in any free society. Equality under and before the law and material equality have not only totally different socio-economic implications. They are in utter conflict with one another and an open society can only attempt to achieve one, but never both at the same time.

Christian Watrin’s works especially from the early 1970s and well into the 1980s, not only reveal the intense debates of the time concerning the development of the market economy and the resurgent and intensifying critique of capitalism. He was also criticizing the thoughtless turn to Marxist social analyses and the ideas about alternative economic systems, driven by the Zeitgeist. Characteristic of Watrin’s essays is the clear articulation of the arguments of critics of the market economy, which are then measured against empirical developments. A well-known example of this is his famous essay, Der neue Klassenkampf: Bemerkungen zum Erklärungswert der Klassenkampftheorien (1976), where he contrasts the Marxist assumptions of the increasing concentration and polarization of economic power with the empirical observation of a growing entrepreneurial middle class. His extensive academic oeuvre developed from his comprehensive view of various interdependent fields of the social sciences. It comprises seminal contributions to the socio-economic foundation of the ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’, applied monetary- and fiscal policy and essays addressing the various legal and administrative problems of the European Union and its organization.

His honest academic approach, his elegant reserve and his fine sense of humor are well known. As a scholar, a teacher, and a patient fatherly friend, Christian Watrin came as close to the vanishing ideal of a gentleman as perhaps humanity will ever permit.
5 years ago he died in Cologne on December 1, 2020.