That ordoliberal arguments would become the local economic instruction sheet for economic policy in postwar Germany was almost overdetermined. First of all, the German population was exhausted and hungry while the country's capital stock was decimated. Fearing political instability, the postwar authorities needed growth, and like the population they governed, those authorities were suspicious of growth coming from "big-state" projects, whether from the left or the right. Second, the Freiburg school, which was not shy in hawking a growth project, emerged from the Nazi period unsullied and more or less intact. While some members were arrested and a few key players such as Wilhelm Röpke were driven into exile, the core of the school was in the right place at the right time, armed with what seemed to be, in the German context, new growth-friendly ideas. The ordoliberals also had powerful sponsors in the form of the leading newspaper of the day, Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the ear of the Allied occupation authorities, at least once the Allies moved out of the punitive phase of the occupation.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 367