Is Neoliberalism Weberian? An Interview with Nicholas Gane

Like a sociological detective of ideas, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick Nicholas Gane (2012, 2014 a, b) has been following the traces of social scientific thought in neoliberalism. The initial clue was given by Michel Foucault who in his Birth of Biopolitics argued that Max Weber’s work not only influenced critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer but also one of the main branches within neoliberal thinking, German ordoliberalism. While Gane’s research ended up finding Foucault’s Weber-Ordoliberals connections rather thin, the investigation took him to an even more worrying result, namely, Weber’s influence on the work of Ludwig von Mises and his followers in Vienna, including the über neoliberal Friedrich Hayek.