In practice, Social Catholicism was more influential than Keynesianism in the economic debates of the postwar period. Alongside of Christian trade unionists and ecclesiastics, academic economists, civil servants, as well as directors of the nationalized sector and large private companies all took part in the conferences organized by the Catholic authorities. The Semaines Sociales de France thus constituted a sort of small-scale model of the world of the "modernisateurs" in the 1950s. Within this framework, the traditional Catholic rejection of liberalism and socialism took on a new significance: at the Semaines Sociales one faction tried "to reconcile planning and freedom" and to associate "economic realism with social progress"; another condemned the planned economy but greeted "the considerable and partially original effort of organization" realized since the Liberation.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 298