Conceptual Obstacles to a Liberal Reaction: The Struggle Against the Socialist Adversary

The chapter starts by demonstrating how extremely conscious neoliberal protagonists had been at the time about the ambiguity of concepts, about fine semantic distinctions and about the value of concepts in political debates. It also shows how neoliberals were torn between the attraction of “social” concepts, of making them accessible for their cause and the repulsion against what they perceived as inbuild appeals to profane emotions (instead of rational arguments). The chapter thus analyses these semantic struggles during the discussions at the meetings of the Mont Pèlerin Society and the public conferences of the Aktionsgemeinschaft Soziale Marktwirtschaft. With the Zeitgeist being favourably inclined towards economic planning and demands for social security, during the first post-war years, neoliberals were faced with a strong edifice of social vocabulary and the insight that semantic concessions were called for. The decision to embrace certain concepts, however, was only the first step of the semantic game, of reshuffling the semantic field, of reinterpretation and drawing new boundaries to further concepts in order to adjust meanings. The chapter thus examines if and how social concepts—like social justice, equality, the welfare state, Sozialpolitik, or the neologism Vitalpolitik—were integrated into the neoliberal scheme.