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Conference : The International Circulation of Ideas: Producers, Brokers and Agents

On the Origins of Some Species of Neoliberal Evolutionary Economics

Author/s : Philip MIROWSKI

The theorists of Neoliberalism have had a funny relationship to the natural sciences over the course of the 20th century. This paper begins an exploration of one aspect of that ambivalent liason: If there is one natural science they said they liked to imitate, it was evolutionary biology. Indeed, they have spent much effort seeking to reinterpret biology as supporting their political position, particularly within economics. In this paper I track a selection of neoliberal theorists of “evolution”: Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Armen Alchian, and some of their critics. Using both published works and unpublished interviews, I clarify the strange roles that evolution was thought to play in their constructions of Neoliberalism.  It is my contention that this entire literature is profoundly misunderstood by most readers, due to a deficiency in appreciation for the context surrounding these writers and the ongoing (almost systematic) mischaracterization of the concept of “evolution” amongst economists. My goal is not to chide economists for getting the biology wrong— after all, what are the odds of ever getting it right? --; rather, it is to counteract the rather widespread impression that this work constitutes a dramatic departure from prior orthodox microtheory, and to point out the ways some rather more grand appeals to evolution which would radically alter the way we think about the economy have been shunted aside by systematic biases in this literature.

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