Freiburg economist and early MPS member Walter Eucken was typical of early neoliberalism in his belief that nineteenth-century liberalism had failed. This failure, Eucken wrote to his fellow German neoliberal Alexandre Rüstow, was not due to its religious and metaphysical foundations. Rather, when liberalism 'lost its religious and metaphysical content, it decayed'. Eucken, one of the founders of Germany's postwar social-market economy, shared the dominant MPS view that securing a competitive market order could not be left to the invisible hand. The experience of the political polarisation and crisis of Weimar Germany had alerted the German liberals to the moral, institutional and legal conditions for a competitive market order. Whatever their differences, the early neoliberals largely accepted that the survival of civilisation required state action to produce the conditions for a competitive market, including by promoting a conducive moral climate. Even the Chicago School's Milton Friedman – who would later describe the invisible hand as Smith's 'great achievement' – argued in 1951 that the collec-tivist faith in the state was 'an understandable reaction to a basic error of nineteenth-century individualist philosophy' and its embrace of laissez-faire.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 117