In 1962 Hayek was appointed professor of economics at the University of Freiburg and became head of the Walter Eucken Institute. Furthermore, he contributed continuously to ordoliberal publications and was a founding editor of the ordoliberal journal Ordo. In the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1960, Henry Oliver stated that "in a sense he [Hayek] serves as their [the ordoliberals] leading political theorist." In a similar vein Knut Borchardt stresses the similarities between ordoliberal scholars and Hayek, especially in their emphasis on the role of law, the institutional framework, and the common political will to establish and preserve capitalism. No less a figure than Alfred Müller-Armack, one of the most politically active ordoliberal scholars in Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s, who also coined the term "social market economy," denoted Hayek, together with Eucken, Franz Böhm, Röpke, and Rüstow, as a pioneer of the ordoliberal "theory of economic order" (Wirtschaftsordnungstheorie).

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 616