ABSTRACT
Hayek believed that human reason was far too weak to be able to significantly remake society and directed strong criticism against all forms of what he called ‘constructivism’, a view that he thought overestimated reason’s capacity to do so. Among the constructivists he counted Descartes, Comte and, of course, particularly the socialists, whether Marxist or social democratic. He contended that ‘trial and error’ had been the way forward, and that this method was derived from the inborn patterns of behaviour characteristic of members of the human species, a species that lived a social type of existence. This, he believed, then developed to a point that enabled, and prompted, individuals to order their actions by following abstract rules, some of which were held consciously, though others existed that were not yet recognised at that level. Hayek maintained that this development occurred after the long
hunter-gatherer state of existence of small groups of genetically related groups or families gave way to much bigger societies characterised by private property.1 They developed agriculture, animal husbandry and crafts, traded with other groupings, eventually leading to what is now called civilisation, of which our present (capitalist) type is the highest form. Though Hayek sometimes recognised the existence of qualitatively different stages of social development within civilisation, the overall impression he gave was that the journey was basically an uninterrupted one, ordered because essentially the same ‘universal rules of just individual conduct’ prevailed in them. And from 1960 on, he referred to this type of development that was created by the action of humans following rules, but not consciously designed by them, as ‘spontaneous’ and/or ‘self-generated’.2
