ABSTRACT
I will concentrate on Friedrich Hayek’s notion of imitation which, like the concept of spontaneous social order, links him to the great tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, the fertile soil from which political economy developed. I propose to compare Hayek and his celebrated adversary, Keynes, on this question of imitation. It is well known that the two economists were on opposite sides of the economic policy debate of the thirties over the respective roles of market dynamics and state intervention in the occurrence of disequilibria. Never to my knowledge has it occurred to anyone to compare their conceptions of the role of imitation in market functioning. It is not hard to understand why not. Hayek himself became aware of its importance only gradually, bringing it to the fore in his final book. As for Keynes, his remarks on the relations between imitation and rationality are found in his theory of financial speculation, a chapter of the General Theory that until recently was not taken seriously. The past several years, however, have seen an impressive blossoming of studies more or less directly inspired by Keynes’s intuitions. The work of the French school of the ‘economics of conventions’ has a prominent place in this trend, and I will refer in particular to the research of André Orléan.
