Spontaneous Order and the Evolution of Behaviors

General Overview

The history of spontaneous order begins with the tradition of Adam Smith and the invisible hand. Adam Smith was one of the first to recognize the importance and efficiency of the market to regulate peoples behavior without requiring the concious intervention of those involved. Hayek and others applied these ideas of unconcious regulation of the market to social behaviors and institutions, applying the term "spontaneous order". The idea of spontaneous order posits that many of the institutions and conventions of today such as property rights, trade, honesty, moral systems, languages, contracts, and exchange have evolved through a complex mechanism of behaviors and self-interest passed down through tradition, teaching, and imitation. Individuals pursuing their own interests conform their behavior to common rules and constraints, which enables them to successfully interact among themselves. Thus, spontaneous order is a product of human action and not of human design (1).

Additionally the theory of spontaneous order rejects the tradition of Marx and what Hayek terms "rational constructivism", or the idea that the extended order of human society and civilization is incapable of being created or designed by reason. According to Hayek, order and "adaptation to the unknown" can be achieved much more efficiently through evolutionary development which allows decentralization of decisions and division of authority to extend the human order, rather than allowing reason, which is itself the result of an evolutionary selection process, to subordinate the system of spontaneous order to itself.

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