(I am grossly simplifying here, as a two hour panel on Girard will substantiate, but this seemed to me to be the gist).
This comes with some neat arguments about how two agents (imagine two greyhounds chasing a rabbit) can compete completely, and still drive a better outcome - at least if you are not a rabbit. The main proposition at the center of the theory, as it relates to new economic thinking, is the argument that since roughly 1900 the West stopped producing for material needs, and “shopping became a leisure sport”. This then changes how we need to think about utility functions and preference formation, because people are not isolated from each other, but for preferences based on not only their own desires, but their perception of other peoples (rivals) desires.
So far, so sensible, and you might think of this as a different flavour of what people like Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis have been arguing for quite a while (most recently on cooperation here, but previously on how preferences are formed through information signals from advertising, other agents and the environment). While the panel never mentioned Bowles possibly for his Neo-Marxist approach (according to Wikipedia), Bowles and Gintis similarly do not mention Girard.
That is interesting as the new psychology argument is trying, very hard, to be linked to a longer history (not just Girard’s books which go back 30 years). It is also trying to link in with INET preferences, which means name-checking: Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Schumpeter, von Mises, Durkheim, Soros and Credit Default Swaps (with an explanation in copying behaviour, rather than - or perhaps as a complement to - the institutional story of how the rewards to brokers drive a path dependency to generate bubbles, as favoured by people like Nassim Taleb).
Where I think they take too big a bite out of thistory is their argument that society has an organising principle “a north star” which is the ‘sacred’ and which before the year 1800 was religion in Europe. There was then a secularisation of society, which shifted behaviours and expectations so that the economy became the ‘sacred’, with non-reciprocal human relationships, leading to mimetic behaviour as people only considered themselves and their economic position relative to their neighbour. It rhymes nicely with Margaret Schabas’s argument on the de-naturalisation of economics over the same period, but makes a very big (implicit) assumption that economic considerations weren’t already the north star of social policy before Victorian England came about. I would question that.
The whole point of the ‘sacred’ is that as a North Star it is the main vehicle for preventing violence, and an organising principle of society. I would tend to agree that the economy - or indeed GDP - has become such a guiding principle. But bear in mind that GDP was only invented in 1941, and before then there were other official measures of the economy that served a similar purpose. Also, the guys at South Park agree with Girard’s reading of the economy as sacred, so it can’t be all bad.
