Dr. Anselm Küsters

Anselm Küsters’ research in economic and legal history revolves around the extent to which specific historical lessons and traditions of thought have influenced – and still influence – political decision-makers and national cultures. His doctoral thesis, carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory and successfully submitted to the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, examined the ordoliberal influence on European competition law by examining Commission decisions and Court rulings in this field of law. Based on new quantitative text analysis methods from the field of Digital Humanities, the now-completed project shifts the focus from the alleged influence of ordoliberalism on the genesis of EU competition law to a consideration of the actual relevance and dissemination of ordoliberal concepts in EU competition policy. The project resulted in the monograph The Making and Unmaking of Ordoliberal Language (Klostermann, 2023).

Taking a similar perspective, his M.Phil. thesis examined the annual reports of the German Council of Economic Experts (1964-2017) by applying a computational Text Mining technique. It concluded that ordoliberal thought was not permanently present in German economic policy advice but that specific ordoliberal ideas have been reactivated during domestic crises. In a related paper, Anselm tested Barry Eichengreen’s popular hypothesis that during the financial and subsequent eurozone crisis, economic and political elites used lessons from the past in their decision-making. The article conducts a quantitative exploration of all 1,009 speeches given by ECB Executive Board members between 2007 and 2015.

In his current habilitation project, which he pursues in cooperation with the Chair of Digital History at Humboldt University Berlin (Prof. Torsten Hiltmann), Anselm is looking at technological change and regulatory discourses from a digital history perspective. His most recent monograph, Small is beautiful 2.0: Mit digitaler Dezentralisierung zu einer menschlicheren Wirtschaft (Herder, 2026), extends this work toward contemporary questions of digital decentralisation and the human-centred digital economy. Further information is available on the Humboldt University website.