F. A. Hayek and the Early Foundations of Spontaneous Order

The short-sighted wisdom, of perhaps well-meaning people, may rob us of a felicity, that would flow spontaneously from the nature of every large society, if none were to divert or interrupt this stream.1 I do not intend to pitch my claim on behalf of Mandeville higher than to say that he made Hume possible.2 As one of the most significant intellectuals of the twentieth century, F. A. Hayek’s contributions in economics, political science, political theory, and psychology often overshadow his lifelong fascination with the origins and development of social theorizing, in particular his concern for the history of ideas in political economy. Throughout his intellectual history, Hayek credits the contributions of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers for their discovery of orderly processes that are of human action but not human design, and he maintains a strong interest in tracing the origin and decline of these ideas in political economy.3 In particular, Bernard Mandeville is a key figure in Hayek’s account of the early foundations of spontaneous order theorizing.