The labels liberal, capitalist and socialist were already incoherent by 1945

Evidence

“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.” … And the word “liberal”— otherwise a favorite— had been irrevocably altered by its increasing association with a progressive worldview. … We cannot rely on static renditions of the philosophies of the present if we wish to understand the dynamics of an earlier time. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 34

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘neoliberalism,’ ‘libertarian,’ and ‘conservative’ all meant something different (or nothing) to the Mont Pèlerin Society’s own members — terminological priority for the reader’s whole project.
• XREF: Echoes the semantic-instability themes in the reader’s previous soundscape and communication-theory reading about how labels and vocabulary carry historical rather than fixed meaning. — connects to: 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; By the 1940s Hayek judged liberalism and socialism to be incoherent word labels. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 34
• SEED: The anachronism argument — postwar actors could not see themselves as ‘neoliberals’ — offers a methodological angle for an essay on how historians retroactively name intellectual movements.

Broader Connections

• 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