Hayek, Co-ordination and Evolution: His legacy in philosophy, politics, economics, and the history of ideas (original) (raw)
«Introduction–Hayek's grand research programme»
1994), Hayek, Co-ordination and Evolution: His legacy …, 1994
Many of the institutions on which human achievements rest have arisen and are functioning without a designing and directing mind . . . the spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend'.
Knowledge and meliorism in the evolutionary theory of FA Hayek
2001
Unlike most economists, the late F. A. Hayek ventured often into domains other than the strictly economic. As a result, his work encompasses a number of social disciplines. Such intellectual trespassing might well have led to a diffuse and disconnected body of work; but this is a danger Hayek understood and largely avoided. The unifying thread in his work is arguably his vision of society as an evolved system of rules, which he often discussed in terms of the concept of "spontaneous order." The negative message of this approach is quite clear: social institutions are not the product of conscious rational design, and attempts consciously to redesign evolved social orders (as envisioned, in principle at least, in most forms of socialism) are likely to yield inferior and even disastrous results. The affirmative implications of Hayek's vision are less clear. What kinds of rules are likely to lead to "good" social orders? K. Dopfer (ed.
Hayek and the “Use of Knowledge in Society”
Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 2013
This entry explicates Hayek's social epistemology, an epistemology that gives due consideration to both the workings of the individual mind and the mechanics of the ambient sociality in which mind is enmeshed. On Hayek's account, mind and sociality are coevolved connectionist-like systems, the latter scaffolding the inherently constrained mind, thereby significantly reducing the epistemic transaction costs involved in the harvesting of knowledge. Hayek's most abiding philosophical insight is the idea that "perfect" knowledge is unnecessary, impracticable, irrelevant and, indeed for these very reasons, its indiscriminating pursuit can be pernicious. Hayek's specific targets were two species of "rationalism": central planning (favored by collectivism) and the abstract individualism of homo economicus (favored by orthodox economics). According to Hayek, these rationalisms fail miserably to appreciate that cultural complexity offers both the fabric of possibility and of inherent constraint. If one understands sociality to be a complex and necessarily
This article offers a critical appraisal of two distinct Hayekian theories, namely the theory of the spontaneous order of actions, and the theory of spontaneous evolution of social institutions. The purpose is to show how Hayek and some commentators and disciples have mistakenly conflated these two distinct theories, and have thereby generated confusion over many other related crucial issues. The aim is therefore to clearly distinguish the two theories in order to identify the real message of Hayek’s teaching, and clear the way for a more useful exploration of self-organising social phenomena.
Hayek and the Hermeneutics of Mind
The article investigates the connections between Hayek's cognitive psychology and his methodological individualism. It argues that Hayek's theory of the sensory order, which is his less-studied scientific contribution, supports an original but largely unknown argument in favour of the Verstehen approach of methodological individualism. Hayek merges a theory of the temporality of knowledge as understood by phenomenological hermeneutics, and notably by Gadamer, with a proto-connectionist theory of mind to develop a perspective that anticipates by decades Varela's and Maturana's neurophenomenology. The article shows that Hayek uses this perspective to criticize the deterministic paradigms of action that consider action to be a mechanical effect of a pre-given reality and challenge the Verstehen approach, which is defended both by methodological individualism and phenomenological hermeneutics.