The “Spontaneous Order” as the Liberation of Individual Actions
Friedrich Hayek is the author who popularized the concept of “spontaneous order,” which was frequently used throughout the nineteenth century. The tradition which represents the society as a spontaneous order is also named by Hayek “the tradition of the invisible hand”.
This means that Hayek considers the authors of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Ferguson and Smith) as the fathers of the new and revolutionary vision of human society which the term “invisible hand” attempts to express. However, Hayek takes care to base the origin of this revolution on the work of Bernard Mandeville (Hayek 1966 [1967]: 134). However contestable that might seem, Hayek writes: “We owe to [Mandeville] the term of ‘division of labour’ and a clearer view of the nature of this phenomenon” (ibid.: 125). Even if the “term” is not an invention of Mandeville, the “nature” of the phenomenon is revealed, according to Hayek, by Mandeville. This “nature” lies in the capacity of the division of labour to coordinate a myriad of actions without any original planning in its capacity of self-regulation. The “spontaneous order” approach aims to prove the beneficial character of a society where all are free even if the concept of the state remains here unquestioned. Undoubtedly Hayek attaches undue importance to Mandeville concerning the advent of this new representation of the society as spontaneous order in the history of European thought. Such an order is largely conceptualized in the seventeenth century, in the Jansenist tradition, by authors such as Pierre Nicole and Pierre de Boisguilbert. However, as it is emphasized in the introduction, in the present entry what are privileged are the specific concepts which allow the analysis of the object of the enquiry and not the question of their authorship.First you must refuse, says Hayek (1966 [1967]), to reduce The Fable of the Bees (Mandeville 1714 [1724]) to an exclusive ethical concern.
The satiric poem, beyond its deliberately provocative style, reveals an interrogation of the nature and the organization of human society. Mandeville’s discovery lies, according to Hayek, with his observation of the fundamental discontinuity between local and global orders. If you refer to Ferguson’s well-known observation, Mandeville discovered that social “establishments... are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Ferguson 1767 [1782]: 203). The gap between the individual design and the result of individual actions on the social level is Mandeville’s real concern.Hayek observes that until Mandeville a dichotomy between natural and artificial orders had repeatedly conditioned and governed political philosophy. Ancient Greeks called these two orders physei and taxis. Nature is governed by laws independent of the will of men. Contrary to this natural order, the human world is conceived as obeying the rules “which were the result of the deliberate arrangements of men” (Hayek [1966] 1967: 130), that is, taxis. Mandeville imagines a third kind of rule sharing both the necessity of the natural law and the artificiality of the human rule resulting from conscious and voluntary deliberations. In the Hayekian terminology this third kind of rule is called “abstract rules” and the order which they govern is designated by the term “spontaneous
order”. Abstract rules are those men obey and apply without any conscious knowledge of their content or even of their existence. The most illustrative examples of abstract rules are those which govern language. An overwhelming proportion of men make use of language without any conscious knowledge of the grammatical laws which govern it. The more the rules are integrated in the unconscious, the more their application is exact and perfect. Further, the abstract rules, in net opposition to the rules of an order as “taxis”, do not aim at achieving particular ends. They are not teleological realities like the concrete rules, the justification and role of which are defined through their finality.
Consequently, a deterministic logic governs individual behaviour when the latter strictly respect concrete rules. All the individuals are requested to conform to an archetypal model. Such a repetitive universe stifles greatly the capacity of innovation, since the novelty constitutes a threat for the stability of the social order governed by concrete rules. It can thus be argued that, through his Fable, Mandeville expresses his wish for the development of “abstract rules” in society, the emancipation of individual action from the determinism of concrete rules. This can explain why Mandeville’s social analysis caused such scandal. The Fable totally opposes the traditional conception of ethics, which is based on the conviction of the existence of a natural and necessary positive relation between individual designs and their social result. According to traditional ethics, the condition of a good, positive, just, well-ordered society is the existence of morally good, just, honest individuals. However, such a conviction raises problems at two levels.First, as observed above, concrete rules are governed by a teleological logic, that is, an essentially non-evolutionist logic, according to which, in the human case, the end to be reached is necessarily clearly foreseen and planned from the start. But this position is totally blind to what Smith attempts to conceptualize in his well-known remark concerning the division of labour:
This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. (Smith 1776 [1976]: I.2.1)
In spite of the serious reservations Smith expresses regarding Mandeville’s ethical position (Smith 1759 [1976]: VII, II, 98 ff.), he agrees totally with the author of the Fable regarding the progressive and non-teleological nature of human fact.
The human edifice is built gradually, progressively, through a process of trial and error and not at the instigation of an omniscient will which defines at the origin the end the social process should necessarily reach. The evolution of societies is a process, the destination of which is necessarily unknown. The famous observation of the Wealth of Nations expresses the same idea: “[the individual] is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (Smith 1776 [1976]: IV.2.9).The second level is more important. The conviction relative to the continuity between local and global orders entails the danger of an authoritarian form of society, that is, a society governed exclusively by concrete rules. If the positivity of the social order depends on the nature of individual behaviours, political authorities would be perfectly within their rights to intervene forcefully and resolutely through a set of strong concrete rules in order to rectify individual behaviours according to the archetypal behavioural model they consider most appropriate. The logic called by Smith “the man of system” would invade the whole society and result in a negation of social diversity:
The man of system... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it... he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard. (Smith 1759 [1976]: VI.II.42)
Here the phrase “cannot suffer the smallest deviation” means the negation of the otherness as such. The man of system who is convinced of the so-called continuity between individual and collective orders regards a different behaviour - which does not conform to the one the archetypal model requires - only as a threat for the happiness of the whole: it must be eliminated.
In fact what is really eliminated here is subjectivity as such since subjectivity is difference. Therefore the capacity to innovate and to create is denied in society.Now the significance of the concept of the “invisible hand” can be understood. It does not mean simply the capacity of a society to spontaneously reach the desirable order. It refers, rather, to the motive of “confidence”. The traditional vision of ethics could not adopt a positive attitude regarding the plurality of modes of existence, the plurality of actions. In the eyes of such an ethical conception the difference represents a danger and a threat. On the other hand, for the vision which points out a fundamental discontinuity between local and global orders, whatever the designs of individuals could be, there is a mechanism other than deliberate planning which coordinates individual actions and models and ensures the social order. The term “invisible hand” designates this mechanism. Therefore, the hypothesis of the invisible hand requires trust, a confidence in the beneficial character of the plurality of the individual actions even if many of the intentions which animate these actions could seem morally reprehensible. Society avoids the grip of the holistic domination of archetypical models thanks to the discovery of the beneficial effect of the infinite diversity of individual actions. In this context the concept of labour is subsumed in the concept of individual action. A society which tolerates the infinite diversity of individual actions logically recognizes the diversity of labours. The division of labour cannot develop indefinitely but by integrating the diversity of labours at its base. Such a process could be defined as a process of recognizing the positivity of Poiesis. In modern times Poiesis always acquires a more ontological value. In other terms, in modern society labour as spontaneous order becomes the driving force of the social dynamic. This observation amounts to saying that in modern times the recognizing of Poiesis and its infinite diversity are considered as the condition of real freedom. A free society is a society where labour and therefore the labourers are free. That means that the individual as labourer is integrated in society as a constituent part of it, on a footing of equality with all other members of the community. That is the fundamental conviction of the modern conception of the world. The tradition of the invisible hand shares unreservedly in this conviction.