I think thiskind of reversal, which the ordoliberals were only able to carry out on the basis oftheir analysis of Nazism, enabled them in 1948 to try to resolve the problem they faced of finding a way of giving legitimacy to a state that did not yet exist and that had to be made acceptable to those who most mistrusted it. Well, let's adopt the free market and we will have a mechanism that will found the state and at the same time, by controlling it, will provide the guarantees demanded by those ~. who have grounds for mistrusting it.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 676