Ordoliberalism took form under the aegis of Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, and Hans Grossmann-Doerth, the founders of the Freiburg school of economics during the 1930s. Their bête noir was the private economic cartels rather than the state. The Freiburg liberals argued that Germany's basic economic problem in the 1920s was "the inability of the legal system to prevent the creation and misuse of private economic power." Note that private, not public, power was the concern. The individual needed to be protected from the state, to be sure, but acknowledging that the state was not the only threat worth worrying about marked Frieburg's departure from the "can't live with it" version of Anglo-American liberalism.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 360