Scholars almost invariably portray the Chicago School and ordoliberalism as propounding contrary major premises regarding monopoly. For example, Chicago neoliberals are said to maintain that competition has a self-correcting power, which ensures that monopoly power is short-lived. Ordoliberals, on the other hand, are not champions of self-healing competition: “Ordoliberal policy does not rely exclusively on the long-term process of self-healing of the overall society [through competition], but protects the individual’s economic freedom of action as a value in itself against any impairment of excessive economic power” (Möschel 2001, 5). Although such characterizations are in broad outline correct, they tend to lead to the blinkered generalization that Chicago liberals and German liberals have always been at loggerheads over the issue of monopoly (and the issue of corporations). In fact, in the immediate postwar period, these two schools held relatively similar positions on these issues. One reason was their intellectual inspirations had a common ground: Henry Simons.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1085