The Hayek-Keynes Macro Debate Continues

This special issue includes articles of five French speaking economists presentedin January 2015 at the University of Paris-Sud during a conference whichproposed to take up the debate between Keynes and Hayek on the origins ofeconomic crises and their remedies. The principle of the conference was toconfront two groups of economists of equal size; one to defend macroeconomicsfrom the work of Mises & Hayek, the other faithful to the Cambridge economist.The idea for this conference came from Mr Bernard Vallageas, my colleagueat the University of Paris-Sud and an active member of the Association for theDevelopment of Keynesian Studies (ADEK). The two day event, Room Vedel, atthe Jean Monnet Faculty in Sceaux, France was the occasion to better under-stand the still major differences which exist between these two, perhaps irre-concilable visions of a market economy and its functioning. These five articlespublished in this Journal complete a first series of publications edited bydifferent reviews; TheJournal of Reviews on Global Economics(Ferlito 2015a),andModern Economics. The principle theme of these five articles is the Austriantheory of crises and its originality in relation to other doctrines.The object of this introduction is to place the contributions of the articlespublished in this issue of theJournal des économists et des études humainesinthe broader debates that took place during the conference, and even morebroadly, into the debates between the two schools. This introduction providesan opportunity to list the main disagreements between the two schools ofthought and to recall the answers that authors faithful to the work of Mises &Hayek give to Keynesian critics and their allies. It replicates the format of theconference: The first part briefly exposes the history of the debate betweenHayek and Keynes;the second focuseson the explanations of the disagreementbetween the two schools, namely, the thesis of market self-regulation and therole of the State in the dynamics of production. Finally, the third part retracesthe debate around the 2008 crisis.