Imitating Moderation: Mimesis in Hayek’s Political Economy

• In Event: Bridging Semiotics in the History of Rhetoric and Political Economy in Britain: Eighteenth Century Norms, Twentieth Century Signals

Abstract

Friedrich von Hayek was a prominent economist and philosopher who became a British subject in 1938. He is well-known for his defense of free-market capitalism and classical liberalism against what he considered to be collectivist thought. In that defense, Hayek figured changing prices as a signaling system that could function extradiscursively to coordinate exchange activities. What is less well-known is that Hayek developed a rhetorical grounding for the operation of price signals in the “spontaneous orders” (language, money, and property), institutions that emerged from the social process of imitation. By reading Hayek’s theory of institution building against his political economy, this presentation will examine how Hayek appropriates mimesis from the classical rhetorical tradition but reconciles it with the practices of emulation advocated by such modernist skeptical political economists as David Hume. Moreover, the presentation will consider how mimetic arguments are deployed in economic debates against antagonists like John Maynard Keynes.

Author

• G. Thomas Goodnight, Univ of Southern California