As we elaborate below, these new institutions and the underlying ideas that served as the blueprints for them were bolted, after a brief period of internal struggle among postwar Christian Democrats, to the existing Bismarkian patriarchal welfare state to form what Alfred Müller-Armack called "the social market economy," a "system of legal rules which can satisfy the general feeling of justice," which would tie citizens to the economic constitution as they realized its benefits. As Ralf Ptak observed, despite their deep misgivings about the welfare compensation, ordoliberals keenly appreciated that the "stability and security [of] the working class was prerequisite to securing the market economy." As a consequence, although the ordoliberals really did not want the economic constitution to be tied to a welfare state, circumstances and politics dictated otherwise: the market economy had to become social.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 366