Conclusion: German Neoliberalism and the Semantic Counter-Revolution

The book closes with a review of neoliberals’ internal conceptual struggles and the semantic strategies publicly employed. The question of how successful German neoliberalism has actually been, it is argued, has to be reconsidered to include its semantic achievements. Sometimes seemingly small semantic adjustments actually had direct (political) effects: adjusting the meaning (and claims) of core concepts can thus shift the fundamentals of the debate. At the same time, closely analyzing their conceptual strategies helps to discern those cases in which German neoliberals failed to enforce their semantic agenda. In fact, the study provides key examples of the linguistic limits of conceptual transfer. The neoliberal semantic “counter-revolution” thus clearly suffered from cultural-linguistic constraints and was only partially successful even in Germany. Finally, the chapter outlines some implications for further research like investigating the middle- and long-term impacts of neoliberal endeavours as first conducted by the think-tank ASM during the 1950s. Further analysing ‘organised neoliberalism’ in Germany could be fruitful in discerning a continuity of (semantic) strategies and political impacts of this school of thought. The neglect of neoliberalism as a political project in German history has up to now prevented research from identifying and further investigating this continuity.