[107402] in Cypherpunks
Herbert Spencer on spontaneous order
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Jan 13 12:52:12 1999
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 12:31:29 -0500
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 12:09:11 -0500
Reply-To: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: Mark Brady <jbrad4@GMU.EDU>
Subject: Herbert Spencer on spontaneous order
To: HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
Members of the Hayek list may be interested to read the following extracts
from Herbert Spencer's "The Sins of Legislators" in The Man versus The
State (1884), passages which strike me as thoroughly Hayekian.
"Such an interpretation soon brings us to the inference that of the
aggregate results of men's desires seeking their gratifications, those
which have prompted their private activities and their spontaneous
co-operations, have done much more towards social development than those
which have worked through governmental agencies. . . .
" . . . The world-wide transactions conducted in merchants' offices, the
rush of traffic filling our streets, the retail distributing system which
brings everything within easy reach and delivers the necessaries of life
daily at our doors, are not of governmental origin. All these are results
of the spontaneous activities of citizens, separate or grouped. Nay, to
these spontaneous activities Governments owe the very means of performing
their duties. Divest the political machinery of all those aids which
Science and Art have yielded it -- leave it with those only which
State-officials have invented; and its functions would cease. The very
language in which its laws are registered and the orders of its agents
daily given, is an instrument not in the remotest degree due to the
legislator; but is one which has unawares grown up during men's intercourse
while pursuing their personal satisfactions.
"And then a truth to which the foregoing one introduces us, is that this
spontaneously-formed social organization is so bound together that you
cannot act on one part without acting more or less on all parts."
Herbert Spencer: Political Writings, ed. John Offer (Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 125-26. Also, Herbert Spencer, The Man versus The State,
with Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom (Indianapolis:
LibertyClassics, 1981), 100-102.
Mark Brady
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
