Spontaneous Order

General Overview

"Thus every Part was full of Vice/ Yet the whole Mass a Paradise;

The worst of all the Multitude/ Did something for the common Good"

The Grumbling Hive by Bernard Mandeville, 1705

The notion spontaneous order has a long tradition in the history of economic though and it can be traced as far as the fourteen century. In The Grumbling Hive published during a time of turbulent campaign against the luxury and vice displayed by England’s ruling class, Bernard Mandeville (1670- 1733), a Dutch physician who moved to Britain, supports the idea of spontaneous order by arguing what the general populace regards as non-beneficial actions actually contribute to the general well being. Mandeville consideres that “passions” of men should not be censored as they are not detrimental to the society in which they live, but should be simply channeled in the right direction (Literature of Liberty, 20).

The term spontaneous order describes the fact that well structured social patterns (institutions and conventions of today such as property rights, money, trade, law, contracts, exchange, languages, honesty, moral systems, and ethics), despite appearing to be the product of rational, omniscient minds are actually the outcomes of spontaneous forces emerging as a consequence of individuals following self-interested ends, and have evolved through a complex mechanism of behaviors passed down from generation to generation through tradition, teaching, and imitation. In their pursuit for self-interested goals, individuals conform their behavior to common rules and constraints, which enables them to successfully interact among themselves and maximize their gains. Spontaneous order is thus not a product of human design but of human action (1). The theory of spontaneous order is concerned with regularities in societies and orders of events that are not a deliberate product of human mind (i.e. constitutional law) or susceptible to purely natural phenomena (i.e. weather) (Barry 8).

Theorists of spontaneous order reject the idea that reason solely—which in their opinion is itself the result of an evolutionary selection process—can allow humans to build an extended order of human society and civilization. Rather, they consider that this can only be achieved through a process of evolutionary development which allows decentralization of decisions and division of authority to include the human order.

While it would clearly be very interesting to give an account of the history of spontaneous order, in this project we will mainly concentrate on the recent past, as it is modern economists who brought the greatest contributions to the development of the notion of spontaneous order. It is the work of thinkers of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightment like Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Reid that set the stage for future economists like

generations to build upon and

who set the stage for the development of modern

who set the stage for the

integrated principles of spontaneous order into general social philosophy (Barry7). Jean-Baptiste Say 

The economist who has made the greatest contributions to the concept of spontaneous order was Friedrich A. Hayek. It was he who applied the term "spontaneous order" to define "a system which has developed not through the central direction or patronage of one or a few individuals but through the unintended consequences of the decisions of myriad individuals each pursuing their own interests through voluntary exchange, cooperation, and trial and error" [Read more Hayek Quotes]

In modern times,

economists like Friedrich A. Hayek, Samuel Bowles and Jack Knight had a significant impact on the deveopment of the idea

General Overview | Major Contributors | Game Theory Models | Objections/Arguments | Sources