The authoritarian liberalism and the crisis of European Union

Abstract

The concept of authoritarian liberalism formulated by Hermann Heller in 1932 has become a contemporary debate topic. Indeed, the European political and economic crisis of the last 10 years seems to perfectly replace the idea of a democratic withdrawal from the liberal economic order. In this article I am going to analyse the theoretical and conceptual level of authoritarian liberalism, and then dwell on the influence that it exercised on some forms of contemporary liberalism (such as ordoliberalism and neoliberalism) practiced both during the integration process

and in the responses of institutions facing the European crisis.