Behind the ordoliberal analysis lurked the promise of a hierarchically structured society, a “natural order” that Eucken, Böhm, and Röpke had all evoked and that had become a quasireligious Ordo talisman of the “new” liberalism in Germany. The basic Ordo mind-set served not only as an ideological backdrop for a hierarchical social model, but also as a way of providing legitimacy for its supposedly irrevocable character. Ordo was regarded as the culmination of Western high culture, defined in classically Eurocentrist fashion as the zenith of human development. Eucken ( 1990, 372) argued that Ordo represented an “order, which accords with the essence of humans; this means an order in which proportion (measure) and balance exist.”

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 510