Biological Metaphors in Economics: Natural Selection and Competition

The paper explores to what extent the process of natural selection put forward by Darwin actually finds its counterpart in "evolutionsi"b interpretations of the competitive market propounded by the monetarists, especially by Hayek, and ultimately what role evolutionism plays in their "vision" of the social process. It will be seen that while the application of the metaphor of natural selection to the analysis of human society, and of the competitive market in particular, is much more problematic than is usually thought, other concepts drawn from evolutionary biology may prove to be far more useful for a "non panglossian" analysis of the development of social processes.