ABSTRACT

The title is intentionally provocative. In his 2010 book The Soros Lectures at the Central European University, George Soros wrote that the Austrian Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek ‘became an apostle of the Chicago School of Economics, where market fundamentalism originated’ (Soros, 2010, p. 22).1 Given that Soros has long been a severe critic of market fundamentalism, it would seem that Hayek and he must be on opposite ends of the spectrum. For precursors, Soros looks to economists such as J.M. Keynes and Frank Knight, to the sociologist Robert Merton, and to the philosopher Karl Popper, all of whose writings in various ways anticipated certain key Sorosian ideas.