One way to examine the ordoliberal effort to understand social reality in that era is to recognize that it constituted a mix of social scientific observation and metaphysical speculation, which operated on three levels: First, the spiritual-moral crisis was held to have caused the degeneration and structural disintegration of society (Röpke 1979, 22ff.). Second was the crisis of development of the mass society, which Röpke and Rüstow, but also Eucken, as early as the beginning of the 1930s, had identified as the central reason for the demise of the Weimar Republic. This phenomenon gained new prominence in the structural analysis of society under the label of so-called proletarianization (Röpke 1979, 30). Third, the ordoliberals posited a crisis of gigantism and bureaucracy (Röpke 1979, 103ff.; Rüstow 1950, 71) in addition to the critique of the central state, making reference to it in order to harshly attack the impact of technical progress (Rüstow 1951), the development of large-scale enterprises (Röpke 1948a), the rapid urbanization of life (Röpke 1946, 287), and the alleged overpopulation (Rüstow 1951, 389; Röpke 1979, 28).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 508