ABSTRACT
One insight was always part of the discovery of such phenomena which are the result of human actions, but not the execution of any human design: that human languages belong to this domain of phenomena. This is also true for the mode of explanation of such phenomena, in the form of Conjectural History, or the explanation by the invisible hand. ‘Of theories of this type economic theory, the theory of the market order of free human societies’, writes Friedrich August von Hayek,
is so far the only one which has been systematically developed over a long period and, together with linguistics, perhaps one of a very few which, because of the peculiar complexity of their subject, require such elaboration. Yet, though the whole of economic theory (and, I believe, of linguistic theory) may be interpreted as nothing else but an endeavour to reconstruct from regularities of the individual actions the character of the resulting order, it can hardly be said that economists are fully aware that this is what they are doing.1
