ABSTRACT
According to Hayek, it was Adam Smith who first made systematic use of the evolutionary theory which Bernard Mandeville and David Hume initiated. 1 Adam Smith (1723–90) explores Mandeville's paradox ‘private vices, public benefits’ and recasts it in the language of the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’. As we saw, the idea of the invisible hand constitutes one of the components of Hayek's theory of spontaneous order (the other component being the idea of cultural evolution). Hayek regards the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ as Smith's most important contribution to social theory. Smith's great achievement, he claims, is ‘the recognition that a man's efforts will benefit more people … when he lets himself be guided by the abstract signals of prices rather than by perceived needs, and that by this method we can best overcome our constitutional ignorance of most of the particular facts, and can make the fullest use of the knowledge of concrete circumstances widely dispersed among millions of individuals’. 2 In a similar vein, Hayek writes that ‘Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic co-operation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His “invisible hand” had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern’. 3 For Hayek, Smith's acknowledgement of man's Constitutional ignorance indicates clearly his hostility to the doctrine of ‘rational constructivism’ 4 . Smith's argument, in common with that of other Scottish thinkers of the time, ‘is directed throughout against the Cartesian conception of an independently and antecedently existing human reason that invented these institutions and against the conception that civil society was formed by some wise original legislator or an original “social contract”’. 5 In contrast to rational constructivism, Smith maintains that ‘man is led to promote an end which is no part of his intentions’.
