Taken on its own terms, ordoliberalism is a peculiar form of liberalism. It does not suffer from the “can't live with it, can't live without it, don't want to pay for it” problem that lies at the heart of Anglo-American liberalism. In the same way that Keynes solved the austerity problem for the New Liberals in Britain, ordoliberalism solved the problem of the state in Germany by transcending it, but in an entirely different manner. Ordoliberals see the role of the state as setting the framework conditions necessary for markets to operate effectively in the first instance. The state they are happy to live with is not, however, the macroeconomic manager focused on the demand side of the economy that emerged out of British New Liberalism. Rather, the ordoliberal state is a rule setter that enables competition and aids market adjustments through the development of specific economy-wide mechanisms and institutions.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 355