Orders, Orders, Everywhere on Hayek's <I>The Market and Other Orders</I>

Abstract

This essay-review (of The Market and Other Orders, volume 15 of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek) uses the essays collected in the volume as a vehicle to discuss certain key issues raised by Hayek's work, including: that the knowledge required for plan coordination is provided not only by prices but also by formal and informal social rules; that the capacity of the price mechanism to coordinate people's plans is best viewed as an emergent property of the market system; that this emergent coordinative power also forms the basis for the process of groupselection the basis of Hayek's theory of cultural evolution; that the nature of the interaction between the overall order of actions and the casual powers of other emergent entities is shaped by social structures; that Hayek's notion of 'order' is different from the economist's notion of 'general equilibrium'; and that Hayek's ideas anticipate those of modern complexity theory.

Hayek’s treatment of legal positivism

“…It is based on two lectures which Hayek apparently gave at Hillsdale College in Michigan. 8 While Hayek's criticism of legal positivism has often been noted (e.g., Gray 1981;Caldwell 2008;Lewis and Lewin 2015), only few authors have examined his arguments in detail. Norman Barry (1979) comments on Hayek's unusual treatment of the subject when discussing his theory of law.…”