Hayek dismissed ‘social’ as an empty weasel-word corrupting real meanings

Evidence

12. “We owe a great enrichment of our language to the Americans, because they were the ones who coined the characteristic term ‘weasel-word.’ This little predator … can allegedly suck the content of an egg without doing any harm to the shell. This reflects the fact that weasel words deprive terms of their actual meaning as soon as they are added… . [T]he term ‘sozial’ is the weasel-word par excellence. Nobody knows what it actually means. But it is definitely true that a social market economy is no market economy … social justice is not justice—and I am afraid a social democracy is no democracy either” (Hayek 1979, 16). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 573

Categorization

• CANDY: Hayek’s crack that ‘a social market economy is no market economy; social justice is not justice; a social democracy is no democracy’ is a quotable one-liner.
• XREF: Shows Hayek’s hostility to German ordoliberal ‘social market economy,’ underscoring the split between Austrian and Freiburg strands covered in the main text. — connects to: Hayek rejected social and economic rights as incoherent and unenforceable — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 145; The social market economy label was emptied of its original neoliberal meaning — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 558; Free expression is meaningless without the social power to be heard — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 355 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Linguistic philosophy suppresses what speech reveals about the society that speaks it #exemplifies (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 652
• The social market economy label was emptied of its original neoliberal meaning #exemplifies (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 558
• Free expression is meaningless without the social power to be heard #contradicts (0.72) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 355