Moderate interpretations of neo-liberalism are grounded on the assumption that the state should fight deprivation but not income inequality because the latter is understood as a precondition of economic prosperity (Béland, 2007; Jenson, 2012). Social investment has become a social policy concept that can be seen as a way to find a new economic legitimacy to social programmes (Esping-Andersen, 2002; Morel et al, 2012; Mahon, 2013; Midgley et al, 2017). Seen as part of the Keynesian policy paradigm as a means of increasing economic productivity, social investment was understood to play a positive role in economic regulation, especially during downturns when social benefits helped to maintain consumption. Rather than depicting social programmes as a pure cost for the economy, as traditional neo-liberal thinkers do, social investment suggests that in a so-called knowledge society investment in human capital (training and education) and social programmes such as universal access to child care and early childhood education are good for the economy.

Max Weber argued that modernity had a disenchanting impact in the way that much had been promised through positivist social science, characterised by primacy of observation in its epistemology, the role of theory, causality, laws and value freedom, and by bureaucratisation. This approach subsumes the particular within the universal and reduces qualities to quantities. In Weber's analysis, modern science and bureaucracy lack any ‘outward’ or public sense of their own intrinsic value to humanity, making them cold, impersonal and anonymous forces – those same characteristics of markets that Hayek deemed valuable (Weber, 1991). The disenchantment of politics by economic ideology depends for its progress, however, on unspoken ethical commitments on the part of its advocates (Davies, 2017: 11). For example, this becomes self-evident when the question of scientific and social scientific methodology arises. In order for objective representations to be generated, certain presuppositions and practical procedures must be adjudged to have a normatively binding force. The stronger the claim to value neutrality, the more rigidly these procedures must bind, leaving value neutrality to become an ethos in its own right (Du Gay, 2000).

Although neo-liberalism as a creed may be preoccupied by a desire to maximise the potential of management in pursuing policy interventions, those in the Weberian tradition (Freidson,1970; 2001) emphasise that the professions – who are charged with carrying out public policies – develop strategies to advance their own social status.