The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays

Homo mimeticus as an Economic Agent

127 Homo mimeticus as an Economic Agent I n L’enfer des choses: René Girard et la logique de l’économie Jean-Pierre Dupuy and I presented a mimetic reading of the modern economy.1 Our goal was to apply Girard’s approach to understand the rise and development of the modern capitalist economy. For my part, that endeavor took the form of an inquiry into the notion of scarcity, one of the fundamental concepts of modern economic science. Or perhaps rather than a fundamental concept of economic science, it would be better to define scarcity as the “state of affairs” that is considered necessary in order for economic activity to take place. Inasmuch as the goal of economics is understood as the (rational) allocation of rare resources and real economies as the process through which this allocation takes place, then the precondition for both economics and economies is a world where abundance is not unlimited. In “L’ambivalence de la rareté,” my contribution to L’enfer des choses, reprinted in English as chapter one of this text, I defended the thesis that scarcity as it appears in modern economies and economic science is not a natural category, but, to the contrary, that there is a social construction, or perhaps a more adequate expression, a social institution of scarcity. This claim can easily lead to many misunderstandings, and it therefore needs to be made more precise and clear. First of all, it is important to say 128 On Economy and Economics what it does not mean. To say that there is a social institution or construction of scarcity does not mean that scarcity does not exist; it does not mean that the limitation of resources is not real, or that the claim that there is such a limitation is only a ruse of the strong against the weak, or of the rich against the poor. It does not mean that claims made about the scarcity of resources are simply ideological, or that they can be reduced to lies seeking to justify unpleasant and unfair policies. Nor does it mean that the world is so abundant in all that we may need that there are no problems concerning the allocation of rare resources. It is clear that we live in a limited world where we are sometimes unable to reach our goals because of insufficient resources. However,inspiteofthisage-oldlimitationofresources,onlythemodern world has adopted the scarcity of resources as a central tenet of its social and political organization and argues that this situation forces upon us particular behaviors and decisions and that it justifies the creation of a new domain of inquiry whose discoveries promise to bring us a level of wealth and well-being previously unimaginable. The questions that then arise are why and how? First, why did this limitation of resources, which had always existed and had always constituted a problem, suddenly became a central issue around which a whole civilization was to be organized? Especially that historically as time went by and civilization became more and more organized around that fundamental belief in the inescapable scarcity of resources, its wealth grew progressively greater and greater. Second, how did this transformation take place? What brought it about? Through what means did scarcity become so evident and central in our representation of the social world? The claim that scarcity is socially instituted or constructed constitutes an answer to these questions. It is, I argue, through a number of social changes, changes that did not bear on a domain that we would usually describe as “economic,” that the preeminence of scarcity was brought to the fore. More precisely, it is through a transformation of the rules of solidarity between groups and individuals that the limitation of available resources became a central social issue to which attention came to be directed. These rules of solidarity were not primarily economic, though they did have an important economic dimension, as they affect the distribution of wealth and resources, but they do not do so through market exchanges; rather, they determine a social domain that partially escapes market exchange by prescribing rules of nonmarket exchanges. It was through the transformation, more precisely Homo mimeticus 129 through the relinquishing of these rules of solidarity, that markets became a paradigm of societal organization and that scarcity was both socially realized and promoted as the fundamental problem of our life in common. Following René Girard, I consider that rules of reciprocal solidarity are an essential part...