Many historiographical accounts paint a picture of a highly politicised economy in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism. This chapter, however, more critically interrogates the production and use of such interpretative patterns within contemporary debates, demonstrating that they were strongly influenced by liberal economists, politicians, and business representatives. It is argued that the contemporary perception of ‘the economy’ as being progressively politicised rested on normative understandings of the boundaries between the political and the economic, as well as on the specific semantics attached to these concepts. The chapter shows that in the Weimar Republic, the new kind of democratic, parliamentary politics was presented as a threat to a ‘sensitive’ economic sphere, which—according to liberal commentators—had to be depoliticised. The subsequent National Socialist discourse claiming a ‘primacy of politics’ only seemingly marked a sharp break with liberal discourse. While it developed a concept of the political in which the conflicts and tensions of ‘democratic politics’ would allegedly be dissolved, Nazi economists were at most ambivalent on the prospect of a fully politicised economy. This chapter argues for the relevance of studying the semantics of both ‘politics’ and ‘the economy’ when investigating historical struggles for a purported depoliticisation of the economy.