Psychology, social evolution and liberalism: a Hayekian trinity

Abstract

The work of Friedrich Hayek describes an extensive political economy, with explicit consideration of the psychological limits to human understanding, the market as a mechanism of information gathering and social coordination, and the relationship between market processes and the free society, where moral and political issues are relevant within a framework of continuous adaptation. Although the survival characteristics of social institutions largely defy rational enquiry, political liberalism secures the diversity that is necessary for evolutionary social adaptation.

Notes

¹An original 41 page manuscript entitled ‘Beitraege Zur Theorie Der Entwicklung Des Bewusstseins’ [Contribution to the Theory of The Development of Consciousness] is dated September 1920.

² The Sensory Order appears remarkably modern in light of the book's dissatisfaction with classical theories of memory and brain function among clinical neurologists, child development theorists, psychologists, linguists and psychoanalysts, and the developments in these areas in the 1990s. Its conceptualisations are especially relevant to psychophysiological parallelism (that is, the notion of a precise mapping between mental and physiological phenomena); and they anticipate the central thesis of Artificial Intelligence research, which is that the mind can in principle be ‘realised in a wide range of different sets of material, both organic and inorganic’ (Smith, 1997, p. 9). As the first proposal ‘of cortical memory networks on a major scale’ (Fuster, 1995, p. 87–89), it foreshadowed Gerald Edelman's (1987) Neural Darwinism and Henry Plotkin's (1994) evolutionary epistemology.

³This is close to the definition of complexity given in the context of biological evolution (see Dawkins, 1988, pp. 2–13).

⁴‘The scientific meaning of emergent … assumes that, while the whole may not be the simple sum of the separate parts, its behaviour can, at least in principle, be understood from the nature and behavior of its parts plus the knowledge of how all these parts interact’ (Crick, 1994, p. 11).

⁵The idea that Hayek believed ‘that emergent powers are germane only to social science’ (Peacock, 1993, p. 252) is clearly wrong: the ‘conception of emergence derives … from John Stuart Mill's distinction of the “heteropathic” laws of chemistry and other complex phenomena from the ordinary “composition” of causes in mechanics, etc’ (Hayek, 1967. p. 26 fn.).

⁶This is a doubtful assertion: ‘We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton's theory of gravity, and the difficulty increases with the number of bodies and the complexity of the theory’ (Hawking, 1988, p. 187).