Spontaneous order

See also: Emergence and Self-organization

Spontaneous order is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos; the emergence of various kinds of social order from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order. Naturalists often point to the inherent "watch-like" precision of uncultivated ecosystems and to the universe itself as ultimate examples of this phenomenon.

Spontaneous order is also used as a synonym for any emergent behavior of which self-interested spontaneous order is just an instance.

History of the theory

According to Murray Rothbard, Chuang Tzu (369-c. 286 B.c.) was the first to work out the idea of spontaneous order, before Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Friedrich Hayek. The Taoist Zhuangzi said, "Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone." . Proudhon said, "The notion of anarchy in politics is just as rational and positive as any other. It means that once industrial functions have taken over from political functions, then business transactions alone produce the social order." Proudhon's position was that freedom is prerequisite for spontaneous order to take place, rather than liberty being the result of spontaneous order. Hence his statement, liberty "is not the daughter but the mother of order."

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were the first to seriously develop and inquire into the idea of the market as a 'spontaneous order' (the "result of human action, but not the execution of any human design", as Adam Ferguson put it first).

The Austrian School of Economics, led by Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, would later refine the concept and use it as a centerpiece in its social and economic thought. Although many Austrian School thinkers and other libertarian figures such as Milton Friedman concurred with Proudhon's position mentioned above, not all have embraced anarchism like Rothbard; a good deal of libertarians maintained support for existence of a minimal state to maintain the liberty requisite for spontaneous order to take place.

In 2004, the understanding of the thermodynamics of spontaneous ordering (creation, existence, and destruction) was made straightforward by the formulation of nine succinct directives. These directives follow jointly from the broken symmetry spelled by the Principle of maximum entropy and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production, which is the statement for nature's preference for selecting the path of least resistance for minimizing gradients of field variables.

Examples

Markets

Many economic classical liberals, such as Hayek, have argued that market economies are creative of a spontaneous order - "a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any design could achieve." They claim this spontaneous order (referred to as the extended order in Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit")is superior to any order human mind can design due to the specifics of the information required. Centralized statistical data cannot convey this information because the statistics are created by abstracting away from the particulars of the situation. In a market economy, price is the aggregation of information acquired when people are free to use their individual knowledge. Price then allows everyone dealing in a commodity or its substitutes to make decisions based on more information than he or she could personally acquire, information not statistically conveyable to a centralized authority. Interference from a central authority which affects price will have consequences they could not foresee because they do not know all of the particulars involved. This is illustrated in the concept of the invisible hand proposed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Thus in this view by acting on information with greater detail and accuracy than possible for any centralized authority, a more efficient economy is created to the benefit of a whole society.

However, constraints must be imposed by an outside agency (eg government) in order to avoid the emergence of bad stable states ie monopoly, as well as to ensure fairness by policing illegal/improper actions such as imposing externalities that benefit a single corporation but imposes the costs across many people; additionally the market must be kept safe from theft, cheating, coercion, etc. that would also distort the proper operation of the invisible hand.

Game studies

The concept of spontaneous order is closely related with modern game studies. As early as in the 1940s, historian Johan Huizinga wrote that "in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of play". Following on this in his book The Fatal Conceit, Hayek notably wrote that "A game is indeed a clear instance of a process wherein obedience to common rules by elements pursuing different and even conflicting purposes results in overall order".

Anarchism

Anarchists argue that the state is in fact an artificial creation of the ruling elite, and that true spontaneous order would arise if it was eliminated. Construed by some but not all as the ushering in of organization by anarchist law. In the anarchist view, such spontaneous order would involve the voluntary cooperation of individuals. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, "the work of many symbolic interactionists is largely compatible with the anarchist vision, since it harbours a view of society as spontaneous order."

Sobornost

The concept of spontaneous order can also be seen in the works of the Russian slavophile movements and in specific the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The concept of an organic social manifestation as a concept in Russia expressed under the idea of sobornost. Sobornost was also used by Leo Tolstoy as an underpinning to the ideology of Christian anarchism. The concept was used to describe the uniting force behind the peasant or serf Obshchina in pre-Soviet Russia.

See also

• Austrian School
• Deregulation
• Emergence
• Free price system
• I, Pencil by Leonard Read
• Mutual aid
• Self-organization
• Natural law
• Natural order
• Organised order
• Revolutionary spontaneity
• Stand Alone Complex
• Stigmergy

External links

• The Tradition of Spontaneous Order, by Norman Barry, Library of Economics and Liberty