Hayek Foundation

In fact, Hayek developed as a scholar steeped in the work of Carl Menger, Friedrich Wieser, Ernst Mach, and a number of other continental thinkers, all of whom never bought into many elements of "The Age of Reason / The Physics of Social Behavior," and all of whom combined economic and evolutionary elements in their explanatory paradigms, accountin... g for the growth of knowledge, institutions, and human flourishing. So the "continental divide" identified by Wilson didn't exist for Hayek as a budding scientist. What is more, Hayek went back and showed that many important enlightenment thinkers working in social theory rejected modern conceptions of "The Age of Reason / The Physics of Social Behavior" as became prominent especially in the 20th century, and these thinkers combined economic, competitive and evolutionary conceptions in their explanatory paradigms matched with undesigned order problems fully compatible with the later Darwinian vision, a vision which Hayek shows was itself derived and inspired in large measure from economic, competitive and evolutionary conceptions from social theory. Hayek points out, for example, that John Locke had a socially evolutionary conception of "reason" and rejected what Hayek often referred to as a "French" conception of reason. Hayek points out that Darwin's branching tree conception of historical evolution by descent derives from the linguistic work of William Jones. Hayek points out that Adam Ferguson, Bernard Mandeville, Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Edmund Burke identified social institutions and structures which were the product of a multitude of human behaviors across time but were not the result of any one man's intentional design. And of course the work of Thomas Malthus on scarce resources, declining marginal utility and competition for goods was the direct inspiration for the Darwinian paradigm itself. Hayek also does something very similar to what Ernst Mayr does in his book The Growth of Biological Thought, Hayek shows how conceptual roadblocks fixed in the ...Read More