Background
Rüstow was born in Wiesbaden in the Prussian Province of Hesse-Nassau.
In Heidelberg he had lived since the 1950s in a floor in the house Mönchhofstraße 26th. He was in his third marriage with Lorena, born Countess of Eckstaedt Vitzthum, daughter of Johann Friedrich Christoph Vitzthum of Eckstaedt married. His marriages sprang seven children. On 30 June 1963 Alexander Rustow died in Heidelberg at the age of 78.
Education
In 1903 Rüstow put prematurely his final examination at Bismarck High School to German in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.
From 1903 till 1908, he studied mathematics, physics, philosophy, philology, law and economics, at the universities of Göttingen, Münich and Berlin. In 1908, he obtained his doctorate under Paul Hensel, at the University of Erlangen, on a mathematical topic, Russell's paradox. From 1911 Rüstow worked on his habilitation dissertation on the epistemology of Parmenides.
Career
He worked at the Teubner publishing house in Berlin, until 1911, when he started working on his habilitation, on the knowledge theory of Parmenides. He had to interrupt his work though at the outbreak of the First World War, when he volunteered for the German Army.
After the war, Rüstow, then still a socialist, participated in the November Revolution, and obtained a post at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, working on the nationalization process of the coal industry in the Ruhr Area. Disillusioned with socialist planning, he started working for the VdMA, the German Engineering Federation in 1924.
In the 1930s, the climate in Germany became too unfriendly for Rüstow, and he obtained a chair in economic geography and history at the University of Istanbul, Turkey, where he worked at his magnum opus, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart (in English published as Freedom and Domination), a critique of civilization.
In 1949 he returned to Germany in 1950 as a full professor at a Department of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Heidelberg appointed. Until his retirement in (winter semester 1955/56), he was also director of the Alfred Weber Institute, was from 1951 to 1956 the first chairman and later honorary chairman of the German Association of Political Science , which functioned as a partner and curator of the FAZIT Foundation the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and sat as chairman until 1962 and later honorary chairman of the Action Committee Social Market Economy (ASM).
"If you need a helping hand, first look for it at the end of your right arm." This favourite expression of Rüstow’s illustrates his deep conviction that on the basis of freedom and individual responsibility, everybody should make the effort to organise and secure his own existence to the best of his abilities, while expressing his creative energy in his (immediate) environment. But it was a long time before Rüstow came to this conclusion. After a broad classical education, he studied the theory of socialism as well as that of liberalism in detail, ending up in the opposition and eventually in exile during the Third Reich. As early as 1932, and having experienced the ongoing economic crisis during the Weimar Republic, Rüstow took a determined stand against interventionist economic policies by the state (interventionism). The state should rather be a referee, concentrating on the creation of and the adherence to the economic and socio-political framework. Competition as the fundamental coordinating principle in a market economy helps to create and preserve space for personal decision-making and acting. Alexander Rüstow 63Rüstow’s aim was a liberal society which puts people first and is organised in such a way that the behaviour that comes naturally to humans is captured and put to good use. Rüstow developed this concept of a social order because he was interested in a large variety of topics, and finally put what he had learnt from his research in cultural history, sociology and economics together, as in a jigsaw puzzle. Because Rüstow was one of the pioneers of this sort of concept, he is now, together with Walter Eucken, Wilhelm Röpke, Alfred Müller-Armack, Franz Böhm and Ludwig Erhard considered one of the founding fathers of the social market economy.