Hayek : penseur génial ou incohérent ?

Hayek and the Use of Physics in Economics: Towards a Progressive Synthesis?

“…The methodological positions of Hayek generate a lot of debates (see for, example, Aimar, 2002; Butos, 2003; Légé, 2007; Tuerck, 1995). While sharing the subjectivist and methodological dualist positions of Menger and Mises, Hayek diverges from them on matters of epistemology—more precisely, he accepted the Popperian philosophy of science; according to which, the hallmark of any scientific theory is its openness to empirical falsification (Hayek, 1964).…”

“…He simply assumed that such a solution will be attained because uncertainty creates possible opportunities for people. This point still generates a lot of debates in the economic literature (Aimar, 2002; Butos, 2003; Légé, 2007).…”

“…5 However, the Hayekian framework is quite ambiguous in its conceptual links with hard sciences. For instance, by arguing that the emergence of a spontaneous order is the only justified way of characterizing the economic complexity, Hayek implicitly considered that economic phenomena can be described through a concept of Darwinian evolution (Légé, 2007). In the same vein, the Hayekian epistemology is very ambiguous about the possibility of making predictions.…”

“…Hayek (1942, p. 288) rejected the idea of reducing the economic reality to a causal or statistical law, but he was not totally opposed to the use of statistics—as reminded in the next section, he simply argued that this kind of knowledge is limited and incomplete (Hayek, 1937, 1945). However, as Légé (2007, p. 35) emphasized, the Hayekian framework is sometimes abstruse on this point since Hayek used a causal reasoning to explain inflation and unemployment. In the same vein, despite his rejection of the universal law (Hayek, 1937), Hayek provided a social theory based on the notion of emergence that, paradoxically, appears as an implicit universal law for complex economic systems.…”

“…In the same vein, despite his rejection of the universal law (Hayek, 1937), Hayek provided a social theory based on the notion of emergence that, paradoxically, appears as an implicit universal law for complex economic systems. This article does not aim at debating these issues (see Aimar, 2002; Butos, 2003; Légé, 2007 for further details on these debates), but it rather shows how the existence of these debates pave the way to a potential conceptual bridge between the Hayekian framework and a new area of knowledge coming from physics that is called ‘econophysics’. In line with the Hayekian framework, econophysics (as I will explain it in the following section) deals with the emergence of a spontaneous order taking the form of a statistical invariance.…”