A recent article in the journal Economic Affairs entitled, “Liberty Between the Lines in a Statist and Modernist Age: Unfolding the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek,” attempts to claim that when Hayek used terms like “spontaneous order” he was writing in a sort of code. In this code, then, “spontaneous order” really just meant freedom and nothing more. Timothy Sandefeur claims that the modifier “spontaneous” is incoherent and essentially meaningless because it is difficult or impossible to determine if the emergence of institutions and customs is really spontaneous.
It seems to me that some of what this paper says is actually quite obvious, but I think it misses the point. The idea of spontaneous in spontaneous order seemed to me to mean not forced or pre-thought out and thus already implied freedom.
"To some extent Hayek wrote in code. When he wrote of ‘custom’ being between instinct and reason, he mainly or often meant liberal principles; of ‘competition as a discovery procedure’, freedom as a discovery procedure; of ‘the market’, free enterprise; of non-central versus central decision-making, freer versus less free. All liberals still practise such a code when circumstances warrant it. Between the lines, then, is a focus on The Distinction (the distinction is “between voluntary and coercive action”).
So is it just code? Or did Hayek mean something more than just freedom when he spoke of spontaneous order? Are these terms useful?
By the way the article is in the October 2010 issue, pp. 82-85.