Abstract

This research paper provides an argumentation analysis of the salient political sentence “What creates workplaces is social”, which can be traced back to the Minister for Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Food in Adolf Hitler’s first cabinet of government, Alfred Hugenberg, and figures prominently in German economic- and sociopolitical discourse since the early 2000s, put forward by conservative and economically liberal politicians. As a starting point of analysis, this paper classifies the sentence as a political aphorism. Focusing on an exemplary quotation from 2003, a mainly implicit argument is then reconstructed and analysed, which necessarily bases on the argument scheme of a-minore, yet fails to instantiate the scheme correctly. To show this, a necessary condition of comparative arguments, which the reconstructed argument does not fulfil, is identified, and a shift in the meaning of social is proven: In the course of the argument, the term social deviates strongly from its usual political meaning in normal language games, as is shown from a Wittgensteinian point of view on semantics. Thus, the grounding a-minore argument as well as the argument as whole turn out to be fallacies of equivocation. Moreover, they do not only, as aphorisms usually do, playfully combine incompatible concepts, but seriously confuse different “Begründungssprachen”, i. e. categorial systems of problem analysis and reflection, namely, an ethical one and a profit-logical one, thereby simulating the former, while actually dissolving it in the ladder. Finally, the reconstructed argument’s conversational implicature of the political measures proposed being sufficient to create workplaces is falsified. In summary, the argument proposes neither a social nor a workplace creating policy, but a cost and tax relief of high earners and enterprises at the expense of dependent employees.