Chapter 1: Is the Concept of “Spontaneous Order” Simply Libertarian Fairy Dust?

As I understand it, our remit here is to try to establish fruitful connections between the Austrian tradition in political economy and the interdisciplinary concerns raised under the umbrella of philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE). This is an impossibly broad task, at least for a single chapter. So, I adopt a narrower focus. On the one hand, I take the work of F. A. Hayek as an exemplar of the Austrian tradition. Moreover, I focus on just one aspect of his work, namely his claim that social orders evolve spontaneously via processes of group selection.¹ On the other hand, I pursue only two of the themes that, I think, have emerged as central to the interdisciplinary undertaking known as PPE.² Specifically, I focus on the recognition that at the intellectual intersection marked by PPE, normative, explanatory, and analytical concerns are thoroughly entangled and that we can most usefully approach that tangle by keeping in clear view the centrality of mechanisms and models in political-economic inquiry.³