Friedrich Hayek is best known for his scathing polemic against central planning and socialism, The Road to Serfdom, which has in recent years become the gospel for libertarians, many of whom are seen thumping it around as the Bible of their creed whilst pulling wool over their eyes at Hayek’s mentions of national insurance and the like. Hayek’s advocacy for free markets, however, takes on a new incarnation in his advocacy for self-regulating markets as a result of spontaneous order, and not of human creation and intention in and in itself. “Spontaneous orders,” the economist Steven Horwitz writes, “are the products of human action but not human design …. [the] unintended consequences of various human actors’ pursuit of their own purposes and aims.”1 Such a line of thought is present, though not explicitly stated, in The Road to Serfdom, that markets out to be left alone, but later progressions in Hayek’s age resulted in what one may only call desultory philosophising about the nature of economic activity, most befitting an economist, not a philosopher of politics.
Continue reading “The Deterministic Conceit”
- Steven Horwitz, ‘From Smith to Menger to Hayek: Liberalism in the Spontaneous-Order Tradition’, The Independent Review 6, no. 1 (2001): 81–97, 82. ↩