Less than five years after the FMS began, Director's 1946 speculation about the power of competition—that is, "monopoly tends to disappear and competition to revive even where once dormant"—became for the Chicago School an assertion of fact—that is, competition undermines all forms of monopoly. This marked a crucial watershed in the emergence of neoliberalism at Chicago and a crucial departure from ordoliberalism. Furthermore, in 1951, Director maintained—despite his 1947 claims at the MPS meeting that corporate power needed to be curtailed to foster a competitive order—that concentrated industries, with a full complement of large corporations, tended to be competitive. Unlike Simons and ordoliberals, he claimed that corporations—even big, behemoth corporations—approximated the impersonal ideal of the market. This change in attitude toward large corporations and concentrated industries marked another salient departure from classical liberalism.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1114