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The investigation of this problem — How is spontaneous order possible? — is sometimes referred to as the 'Hayek programme'.
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Jon Elster, "The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order", 1989, p. 250

 

Friedrich Hayek

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Regarding social order, Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F.A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. But Hayek's views about the "spontaneity" of social order remain controversial. In their extreme form, they imply that all deliberate efforts to manipulate social order — social engineering — are doomed to failure because the complex nature of our cultural heritage makes a complete understanding of the human condition impossible.
Hayek was certainly correct that we have, at best, a very imperfect understanding of the human landscape, but "spontaneous" it is not. What distinguishes human evolution from the Darwinian model is the intentionality of the players. The mechanism of variation in evolutionary theory (mutation) is not informed by beliefs about eventual consequences. In contrast, human evolution is guided by the perceptions of the players; their choices (decisions) are made in the light of the theories the actors have, which provide expectations about outcomes.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

I must say that I have been deeply gratified by reading a book [Hayek's "The Sensory Order"] of which I had not been aware when I wrote my little essay on group selection theory … I was deeply impressed … I recommend this book to your attention [i.e. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences], as an exercise in profound thinking by a man who simply considers knowledge for its own sake. What impressed me most is his understanding that the key to the problem of perception is to comprehend the nature of classification. Taxonomists have struggled with this problem many times, but I think von Hayek considered this problem in a broader sense.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

It is likely that many modern economists would have no difficulty accepting Hayek's statement of the problem [of macroeconomics] as roughly equivalent to their own. Whether or not this is so, I wish … to argue that it should be so, or that the most rapid progress toward a coherent and useful aggregate economic theory will result from the acceptance of the problem statement as advanced by [Hayek].

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

[Hayek] did contribute toward an important conceptual development in his reflections on the problems raised by extending the analysis of equilibrium in time. In a key article of 1928 published in the 'Weltwirtschafliches Archiv,' he observed that it was not possible to ignore the element of time in the simultaneous determination of prices if analysis was to be extended to monetary phenomena. {quotes Hayek} Hayek defined the problem concisely as one of an intertemporal system of prices. {quotes Hayek}.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

Since I shall be indicating my disagreement with some of the points made by Professor IsraelKirzner, let me stress that I am in complete sympathy with his point of departure, namely, the emphasis on the dispersion of information among economic decision-making units (called by him, "Hayek's knowledge problem") and the consequent problem of transmission of information among those units.
Much of my own research work since the 1950s has been focused on issued in welfare economics viewed from an informational perspective. The ideas of Hayek (whose classes at the London School of Economics I attended during the academic year 1938-39) have played a major role in influencing my thinking and have been so acknowledged.

 

Friedrich Hayek