Orders, Orders, Everywhere … on Hayek's The Market and Other Orders

Abstract

This paper is a review essay of the latest volume of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, entitled 'The Market and other Orders.' The paper examines the development of Hayeks' ideas about order, as manifested in the essays collected in this volume. Issues examined include: Hayek's accounts of the market and the mind as spontaneous orders; his reliance in those accounts on the notion of emergence; his account of complex systems, in particular his vision of the world as consisting of many different, hierarchically-organised, and interacting, complex orders, of which the market is but one; his analysis of cultural evolution as occurring via a process of group selection; his preference for the notion of 'order' over that of 'equilibrium'; and the relation of his ideas on complexity to those of modern complexity theorists.

Keywords: Hayek, Austrian economics, spontaneous order, complexity, emergence

JEL Classification: A31, B2, B3, B4, B5, D5, P00