ABSTRACT
A broad consensus prevails today amongst economists about what Caldwell (1988) has labelled ‘Hayek’s transformation’. MacCloughry (1984), Lachmann (1986), Boettke and Prychitko (1994), Fleetwood (1995) or Longuet (1998), for instance, consider that Hayek’s scientific life is characterised by a fundamental break, permitting us to distinguish two different research programmes, the second beginning in 1936 with the presentation of ‘Economics and Knowledge’ (Hayek 1937) to the London Economic Club. More precisely, before 1936 Hayek is broadly described as a Walrasian scholar who thought that resort to the concept of general economic equilibrium is necessary, and who developed a strict formalistic conception of economic theory that left little space for the problem of knowledge. After 1936, Hayek is supposed to have ‘seen the light’, abandoning his Walrasian outlook and building a theory of knowledge, thereby progressively substituting the concept of order for that of equilibrium. This new research programme is supposed to give up the determinism of traditional economic theory for the relativism of a theory of social orders. Boettke, Horowitz and Prychitko express this view when, referring to the notion of social order, they observe that it entails the use of the concept of process instead of that of equilibrium interpreted as a final state. They add:
An evolutionary process is open-ended, in that the process does not tend towards any state. Consider what it would mean for human evolution to tend towards a final state. No biologist would even say that we need to have a fully evolved human to understand the process of evolution.
