Preface

¹For an excellent discussion of language as a form of spontaneous order, and a Hayekian critique of “artificial languages,” see Richard Adelstein, “Language Orders,” Constitutional Political Economy 7 (1996): 221–38. For a popular account of linguistics that stresses the “spontaneous” character of language, see John McWhorter, The Power of Babel (New York: Harper-Collins, 2003).

²The phenomenon Hayek labels “spontaneous order” is being investigated in a wide range of fields today, from biology to cosmology to cybernetics, and under a variety of names, including “emergence,” “complex adaptive systems,” “self-organization,” and “collective intelligence.” For a concise and elegant statement of the idea of spontaneous order under the rubric “organized complexity,” see Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36 (1948): 536. For a sampling of books exploring what Hayek calls “spontaneous order” in such fields as urban history, software development, and biological evolution, see Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997), Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, Robert Bononno, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1999), Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2007), Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), especially chaps. 1-4, and Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Some of these books refer to Hayek; some of them do not; but they all in one way or another deal with questions of self-organization and what Hayek calls the dispersed nature of knowledge in complex societies.