George Soros: Hayekian?

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’ 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. In the first two sections of this paper, I will show that in fact F.A. Hayek and George Soros share many views in common, some of them ontological (having to do with the nature of reality) and others methodological (having to do with the appropriate way to study and represent economic phenomena). I will then point out some differences between them, though we will see that, even here, they are closer than one might initially expect. If at the end of the day George Soros still rejects the label of Hayekian, perhaps he will not mind if we instead describe Hayek as an ontological and methodological Sorosian, avant la letter!