Hayek, “What is ‘Social’?—What Does it Mean?”

This file contains a single conceptual-political essay: a revised English translation of Hayek’s 1957 German article. Its scope is narrow but ambitious. Hayek examines one adjective—“social”—as a political instrument whose moral prestige, he argues, has made it conceptually destructive. His main thesis is that the word often no longer clarifies policy or ethics, but turns precise terms into flexible slogans.

The immediate targets are postwar formulas such as “social market economy” and “a social Rechtsstaat.” Hayek treats these not as harmless modifiers but as symptoms of a broader collapse of distinctions. The word suggests moral seriousness while concealing disagreement about ends, means, and authority. Historically, he argues, “social” first acquired force in the nineteenth-century “social question,” when elites were urged to notice the condition of excluded classes. But once mass democracy arrives, that paternal sense becomes unstable.

To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.

The essay’s central conceptual move is to recover an older meaning of society. In that sense, the “social” is not what the state designs for collective purposes, but what emerges from many actions without central direction: language, custom, law, conventions, and moral rules. Hayek’s liberal argument depends on this distinction between society as spontaneous order and society as organized command.

The truly social in this sense is, of its very nature, anonymous, non-rational and not the result of logical reasoning, but the outcome of a supra-individual process of evolution and selection, to which the individual, admittedly, makes his contribution, but the component parts of which cannot be mastered by any one single intelligence.

Modern political language, however, makes “social” mean communal, benevolent, democratic, state-administered, or morally superior. For Hayek, this inflation makes the word nearly useless while increasing its rhetorical power.

There then remains little or nothing in life which is not ‘social’ in one sense or another, and the word becomes, to all practical intents, meaningless.

The ethical argument follows from his epistemology. Traditional morality consists of general rules that guide conduct under limited knowledge. “Social” morality, by contrast, asks people or governments to pursue concrete collective results and to calculate remote consequences. Hayek sees this as false rationalism: it undermines inherited rules in the name of aims no mind can fully know or coordinate.

Thus, by undermining respect for rules and ‘plain’ ethical behaviour, this demand for ‘social behaviour’ is destroying the foundations on which it is itself built.

His attack on “social justice” develops the same point. Justice can govern rules and equal treatment, but not a total distribution according to moral desert, because no authority can know all the circumstances that constitute merit.

The demand for the latter, for a reward according to merit, is a demand which cannot be met in a free society, because we cannot know or isolate all the circumstances which determine merit.

Hayek also argues that “social” language weakens personal responsibility. It blurs the line between what individuals owe directly and what “society” supposedly owes collectively, inviting people to demand moral achievements at others’ expense. Politically, it encourages expediency over principle: abstract limits on coercion are overridden for allegedly social ends.

The essay culminates in a reversal of the word’s prestige. True service to society means protecting the freedom through which spontaneous orders grow. What calls itself “social” may instead subordinate society to the state.

In this context, it seems to me that a great deal of what today professes to be social is, in the deeper and truer sense of the word, thoroughly and completely anti-social.

Its relevance lies in Hayek’s warning against morally charged political vocabulary that pre-decides disputes. The essay is both semantic and institutional: by separating society from state direction, Hayek defends freedom, general rules, and evolved order against the rhetoric of collective purpose.