Few were as vocal in their rejection of laissez-faire as the German ordoliberals Röpke and Rüstow. During the war, both men lived in Istanbul, where President Kemal Atatürk's attempt to secularise and modernise Turkey prompted them to focus on the moral and religious foundations of a competitive market economy. Rüstow criticised the call to laissez-faire as both a 'summons to honour God and an adjuration not to allow short-sighted human anxieties to interfere in the eternal wisdom of the natural law'. He believed it had led previous liberals into an overly 'care-free' faith that, left alone, the market would improve 'moral standards'. The ordoliberals accepted that, by promoting mutual dependence, 'the division of labour can be conceived as one of the most potent civilizing factors'. But theirs was not a straightforward 'sweetness of commerce' thesis; they regarded competition as morally dangerous and believed that, left alone, the market would not produce the necessary 'lubricant of morals, sentiments and institutions'. Röpke derided the invisible hand as a ' "philosopher's stone" that turned the base metal of callous business sentiments into the pure gold of common welfare and solidarity'. A competitive market order, the ordoliberals argued, required an institutional framework and 'a generally observed and undisputed code of moral norms and principles of behavior'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 118