Spontaneous Order and the Hayekian Challenge to Interdisciplinary Social Scientists

David Andersson

Atlantic Economic Journal, 2021, vol. 49, issue 4, No 4, 363-375

Abstract: Abstract The social sciences have been divided into departmental silos for far too long, yielding at best partial insights among economists, political scientists, and sociologists. The most influential attempt at integration, economic imperialism, distorted our understanding of processes with looser constraints than among producers in competitive markets. The theory of spontaneous order, first developed by Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s and 1950s, offers a more promising framework for interdisciplinary social theory. It does not rely on unrealistic assumptions of maximizing behavior, unlike rational choice theory borrowed from neoclassical economics. It is compatible with psychological findings on human behavior, recognizes the heterogeneity of resources and constraints in different social orders, and pays attention to historical processes of individual and social learning. Spontaneous-order theory provides a unified framework for four key orders of decentralized human interaction: the cultural, democratic, market, and scientific orders. Each such order is associated with order-specific resources. Order participants face constraints, but these constraints are not always the same, even within the same order. For example, competing producers face relatively tight break-even constraints, which make their actions unusually predictable. In contrast, consumers in a market order or politicians in a democracy face looser constraints. They are not compelled to maximize utilities or votes, but their relatively loose constraints nevertheless make many potential actions infeasible. Consumption requires money and policies require votes and resources. Exact predictions become impossible, but spontaneous-order analyses offer the promise of more reliable pattern predictions.

Keywords: Spontaneous order; Economic imperialism; Interdisciplinary social science; System constraint; B25; B53; Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11293-022-09735-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:atlecj:v:49:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s11293-022-09735-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11293/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11293-022-09735-8

Access Statistics for this article

Atlantic Economic Journal is currently edited by Kathleen S. Virgo

More articles in Atlantic Economic Journal from Springer, International Atlantic Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().