ABSTRACT

One answer to the question raised in the previous chapter is probably the widely shared belief, in today’s economic science, that anything of benefit to the community will come about unaided at some point in time and that anything failing to assert itself in its own right can barely be in the interests of society as a whole. Quite obviously this is the opinion of liberalists and advocates of ‘Social Darwinism’ (see, inter alia, Nozick 1974, pp. 314-17, Jensen & Meckling 1979, p. 473, Williamson 1975, 1980, p. 35 and 1985, pp. 265-68) or of authors such as Hansmann, who analyse social evolution by reference to the ‘survivorship test’ (see Hansmann 1996); but it is fair to say that a less extreme version of this view is widely shared even by economists who do not think of themselves as laissez-faire liberalists.1 An important preliminary observation is that the central proposition behind the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ is that the survivors are those best adapted to a given environment under the circumstances prevailing from time to time (see Hodgson 1996, p. 100).