By the 1940s Hayek judged liberalism and socialism to be incoherent word labels.

Evidence

The state of uncertainty that characterized market advocacy in the 1930s and 1940s was evident in, and to some extent precipitated by, an inability to build consensus about conceptual apparatuses that many saw as ambiguous or obsolete. “Terms like ‘liberalism’ or ‘democracy,’ ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism,’ today no longer stand for coherent systems of ideas,” Hayek observed shortly after the conclusion of World War II. He saw them instead as “aggregations of quite heterogeneous principles and facts” that had become linked to certain words by means of a “historical accident.” — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 34

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives Hayek’s own exact diagnosis that political-economic category words had lost stable referents.
• XREF: Funds a terminological definitional project distinguishing 1940s ‘neoliberalism’ from today’s usage, valuable for the austerity-reading purpose. — connects to: The labels liberal, capitalist and socialist were already incoherent by 1945 — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 34

Broader Connections

• The labels liberal, capitalist and socialist were already incoherent by 1945 #corroborates (0.92) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 34