ECONOMISTS AND THE ECONOMIC ORDER The field of economists and the field of power in France.

Economic beliefs play a central role in the social construction of economic reality. It is necessary to include in the programme of a new economic sociology the active contribution of the main producers of economic beliefs, namely the economists. The role of economists in the reproduction of the social order can, to a certain extent, be described as the function of a central bank of economic beliefs. Economists are the producers of economic beliefs that are received, interpreted, used by various kinds of social actors in everyday life. In a situation of crisis like the one the French government faced in December 1995, it seems more and more obvious that they are becoming the ultimate reference, the lender of last resort for most contemporary social actors - economic leaders, technocrats, politicians, unionists, intellectuals, etc. To understand this particular position, one needs to consider economists as members of a specific social field, which has its own laws, regularities and structure. The social characteristics (especially the distribution of their kinds of capital, and the relative dispositions of economists) define their positions in this social space. It is then necessary to determine the relative autonomy of this field and its interdependence with other social spaces (for example, the field of enterprises, the bureaucratic, political and media fields, etc.). The main hypothesis developed here is the idea that the field of economists is less autonomous than it is usually thought to be, at least by many economists, and its structure is very similar to that of the field of power (and, among others, the opposition between economic and intellectual powers). In the general interdependence and homologies between social fields, the logic of the field of economists is a key contribution to the production of the symbolic economic order. The word 'science' applied to economics refers not only to an epistemological issue but also to the symbolic aspect of the order we refer to when we talk about economic reality, economic argument, economic constraints, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]