The Economy of Imitation: Mimetic Desire, Mediating Institutions, and the Common Good

Modern economic life is usually explained by incentives, information, and rational self-interest. Beneath all of them runs a far older force: imitation. We desire what others desire — and at scale, that mimetic dynamic drives consumer demand, status competition, speculative manias, viral politics, and the cycles of blame by which societies discharge their accumulated rivalry. Drawing on René Girard's mimetic theory and his book The One and the Ninety-Nine, Luke Burgis argues that a free economy and a free society depend on something markets cannot supply on their own: differentiated persons, and the mediating institutions — family, church, local association — that stand between the individual and the mass. When those buffers erode, only two options remain, the herd or the mob, and neither is free. This talk maps the economy of imitation and asks what it takes to build a social order in which persons, not crowds, remain sovereign.