F.A. Hayek as a Political Economist: Economic Analysis and Values by Thierry Aimar

Author:Thierry Aimar [Aimar, Thierry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Orders as knowledge-generating objects

In the final analysis, Hayek’s program, with its consistent stress on the limits of knowledge, has yet to give rise to a fully analytical theory of social order. In seeking a possible path for continuing Hayek’s work, we note that, while the problem of order presents us with the realization that there are inevitable constraints on knowledge, there is another side of the coin – the importance of the knowledge-generating characteristics of orders.

In considering the problems raised by Hayek’s attempt to move from catallactics to the more complicated cases of social orders, we claim that, while Hayek clearly saw individual knowledge as order-dependent (i.e. dependent on the structure of the sensory order), he never fully generalized this idea to the market order or to other social orders. When talking about knowledge in the context of the market he seems always to refer to the potential within the market order for communication of dispersed and tacit individual knowledge, not to the generation of completely new knowledge.

Ironically, the idea of order-dependent knowledge and of its generation as referring to a different classification is brought out very clearly in Hayek’s sensory order work, where he emphasizes the contingency of individual knowledge with respect to the structure in which it is generated. He says explicitly that “a question like ‘what is X?’ has meaning only within a given order” (1952b, p. 4). Later, in “The Primacy of the Abstract,” he is equally clear in saying that “it is meaningless to speak of perceiving or thinking except as a function of an acting organism in which the differentiation of stimuli manifests itself in the differences of the dispositions to act which they evoke” (1978, p. 40). Again, in the same article, he characterizes human knowledge as “primarily a system of rules of action” (p. 41) in which appropriate action patterns are invoked by sensed combinations of stimuli – an effective classification of the stimuli, but one very much tied to the actual structure of the classificatory apparatus.

But, in applying this idea to orders other than the sensory order, he becomes much less clear. He does clearly distinguish between scientific knowledge and individual knowledge of “the particular circumstances of time and place” (1945, p. 521), but does so without referring to the distinct contexts in which these different sorts of knowledge are generated. When he speaks of the function of the market system as enabling “the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality” (p. 520), he fosters the notion that there actually is such a thing as that totality independent of the circumstances of its generation, and that the problem is how best to accumulate it. Of course, he strenuously denies that direct accumulation is even possible, and clearly represents the price system as communicating “by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information” (p. 527). But, although the idea seems to be just below the surface, he never explicitly identifies the price symbols as knowledge generated by the market order.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.