ABSTRACT
One important theme of Hayek’s later work has been the contrast that he has drawn between an extended social order based upon markets, and earlier forms of human organization. He has argued that the former, which he favours, is morally significant-not least because it is required if we are to be able to support the numbers of people who are at present alive. This theme becomes the focus in his work for a contrast between an extended, market-based social order, and a more face-to-face society. In the former, people pursue economic self-interest, in an appropriate legal and institutional setting, their conduct also guided by various inherited moral and behavioural rules. In the latter, to which Hayek thinks humankind is more instinctively attuned and for which many of its moral and religious traditions were well adapted, people respond, rather, to the direct needs of others with whom they are in more immediate relations.
