Types of Rules

The different types of rules of conduct are named by Hayek as “articulated”, “unarticulated” and “implicit” (see “Law, Legislation and Liberty”, Chapter 4), following progressive degrees of abstraction. The “command” is an articulated rule which conveys a concrete purpose. The norms of just conduct may be articulated or unarticulated, but in both cases they will be purposeless. A leading case would be that whose solution was implied in unarticulated norms of just conduct. The new precedent invokes a norm not enunciated before, but being considered as just once it is articulated by the judge, because it expresses an implicit feeling of justice previously shared by everyone. The most difficult task in the Hayekian theory of law is to explain convincingly the sphere of the implicit norms just conduct. The norms of that kind inform our notion of justice, notwithstanding they are insusceptible of ever being fully stated or provided of a complete rational justification. In the Chapter Four of Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek explains that even the already articulated norms of just conduct rest on a background of implicit norms, which give sense to the former. This is a central issue for Hayek’s critical rationalism, whose implications reach his theory of democracy.

Levels of abstraction

In “The Sensory Order” and in “The Primacy of the Abstract”, Hayek suggests that the mind is made of the juxtaposition of several kinds of abstraction levels and systems of classification. Mind is part of the nature and the different levels of abstraction that compound it change in response to the changes in the environment. The rational agent is unaware of the highest levels of abstraction that condition his mind. These highest levels of abstraction are formed by social institutions, aesthetic values, “moral sentiments”, etc, and evolve following a natural selection pattern. That the rational agent is not able to choose or modify such levels of abstraction is at the core of the notion of “spontaneous order”.

Reason, institutions and evolution.

The statement that institutions define different kinds of rationalities is a mislead conception of the evolutionary interaction between mind and its environment. Rationality is only of one type: the adjustment of means to ends. Although this instrumental notion of reason has its failures, is better than any paralogism. What institutions really do is to condition rational agent’s decisions to follow a certain pattern in order to maximize the utility of his resources. The result of this conditioning is a rational action according to the limitations imposed by institutions. Nevertheless, reason is always only one –what change are the different outcomes of its application in different environments. What evolve are the institutional frame and, specially, an important part of it: the strategies for adaptation to the environment. At this point, we need to feed the Hayekian social thought on game theory.

Feedforward Systems

As Hayek stated in “Law, Legislation and Liberty” that society works as a negative feedback system, we can say that individuals and groups act as if they were feed-forward systems. At least, that is what we can conclude from reading Hayek´s essay “Economics and Knowledge”.

Feedback Systems

Adolph Löwe pointed out that Hayek thought of the capitalistic economy as a negative feedback system, while J. M. Keynes and he saw it as a positive one. Institutions were at the core of the problem: For Löwe, property rights were the source of the anarchy of production. On the other hand, Hayek stated the legal systems based on them made the economy stable.

Post Rationalism

We can define Hayek's thought as some kind of post-rationalistic philosophy.

Blind Machine

We can picture the Hayek’s spontaneous order as a blind machine, which provides the subjects involved in it with a perception device. In this sense, Hayek social theory is similar to Deleuze’s explanation of Foulcault’s diagram. Notwithstanding, the origin of this coincidence is their empiricist common root.