Spontaneous Order
General Overview
Thus every Part was full of Vice Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
The worst of all the Multitude Did something for the common Good
The Grumbling Hive by Bernard Mandeville, 1705
This is part of a poem published by Bernard Mandeville in 1705, during the time of a turbulent campaign against the luxury and vice displayed by England’s ruling class, in which he argues that the actions of the those considered by the general populace to be non-beneficial, actually contributed to the general well being. Mandeville considered that “passions” of men should not be censored as they are not detrimental to the society in which they live, but 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.
The history of spontaneous order has its roots in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightment, when thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Reid 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
