This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Walter Eucken looked at interwar German capitalism and saw neither a free market nor a planned economy but something he considered worse than either: an economy dominated by cartels, private monopolies and organized interest groups that had captured market power without any state actively maintaining competition against them. Eucken had held a professorship at the University of Freiburg since 1927, and it was there, as what became known as the Freiburg School coalesced as a collaborative circle in the early 1930s, that he and colleagues including Franz Bohm developed a doctrine that rejected two opposite errors at once. Laissez-faire, they argued, wrongly assumes markets stay competitive on their own; left alone, powerful firms tend toward cartelization and monopoly, not competition. Central planning, the opposite error gaining ground in the same period, replaces the market with bureaucratic command and loses the price signals a functioning economy needs. Eucken's alternative, Ordnungspolitik, policy for the economic order itself, made the state responsible for constructing and continuously enforcing the legal and institutional framework, above all antitrust law and a stable currency, within which private competition could then be trusted to operate. His fullest statement of the doctrine, Grundsatze der Wirtschaftspolitik, appeared in 1952, two years after his death on 20 March 1950, but the ideas had already begun shaping West German postwar economic policy through his students and allies.