The German neoliberal school managed to distance itself from classical liberalism by accepting authority for the shaping of economic policy, and by having the resources and capacity for design of a postwar new liberal policy for society at large. As far as economic theory was concerned, German ordoliberalism, unlike the Austrian school that emerged around Mises and Hayek, maintained a strong attachment to the neoclassical equilibrium model, as evidenced by Eucken's formalistic market model. This situation may also have been overdetermined, since the American victors were busy inserting "good" neoclassical economics into the reconstructed German universities (Bernstein 2001).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 551