Spontaneous Order

Order, Spontaneity, and the Invisible Hand

In an abstract sense, order is constituted by relations among parts or elements. So understood, order has less to do with power, authority, or control than with comprehensibility. Within an order, elements are so related, in regularities and patterns, that if one understands some subset of the elements and relations, then one may form predictions, or reliable expectations, about other parts of the whole. Within a society, the elements would include individuals and organizations, including business firms. Society manifests order insofar as relations or interactions among individuals and organizations allow individuals to form reliable expectations about the conduct of others.

There is always some sort of order within any society, but an order is spontaneous insofar as it is unintended. An outcome is intended precisely when that outcome is desired by the acting agent, and the agent [Page 1984]performed the act to bring about that outcome because the agent believed that this outcome would be the effect of that action. A paradigm instance of an intended action would be when a lawgiver enacts a law and that law has precisely the effect desired by a lawgiver. On the other hand, for any unintended result, there is a lack of correspondence between intention and effect. Thus, in an unintended or spontaneous social order, regularities or structures arise as individuals, with particular aims and purposes, respond to their own situations and adjust their conduct in light of what other persons are doing. A series of mutual adjustments occurs among individuals so that common patterns of conduct emerge even though such regularities are not the intention of any particular individual but arise, as Adam Smith suggests, by an “invisible hand.” Thus, one may explain such orders by employing, what have come to be called, “invisible hand explanations.” Such value-neutral (or descriptive) explanations should characterize a set of initial conditions, describe how individuals interact in those conditions, and specify some principle that explains how the interaction of agents within these conditions brings about patterns that were not part of any one individual's intention. These patterns then allow these same individuals to form reliable expectations. Such orders, whose spontaneity may be a matter of degree, emerge either in a specified slice of time or over longer periods of time (as in the case of cultural evolution).

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