On the one hand, this concept can be assessed as a successful local implementation strategy for the transplantation of ordoliberal ideas into the West German postwar society of the 1950s. PR campaigns were successfully employed, in much the same way that one would sell soap or cars, to overcome the widespread skepticism of the West German people toward a market-oriented order of society. … Since the trade unions and the Social Democratic Party learned to use the concept in the same opportunistic way as the ordoliberals, persuading governments to expand the welfare state under continuous reference to the social market economy, the model increasingly lost its original neoliberal content. Thus, the social market economy as a programmatic concept was gradually afflicted with dissolution, first and foremost because of the evolutionary structure and flexibility inherent in its own argument.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 558