Marginal utility theory solved an old economic problem, explaining how prices were set in the market, replacing the labor theory of value. The key insight was that value as reflected by price was set by the collective impact of millions of independent decisions by consumers participating in the market. Therefore price mirrored the collective values […]
This post repeats and slightly expands and clarifies a blog I wrote about a year and a half ago, reporting on the deceisions a group of scholars came to concerning the different terminologies that had risen within various disciplines that had independently arrived at studying emergent order phenomena. The resulting terminological diversity led to problems […]
I am deliberately using this blog to explore and try and provoke discussion of the “hard questions” involved in expanding the study of emergent orders, particularly Hayekian spontaneous orders. We need to do this to prevent Hayek’s insights from becoming the preserve of a narrow political agenda which automatically discredits them in the eyes of […]
The growing income disparity in the United States is reviving talk about class struggle and class war, not in a Marxist context, but rather from the perspective discussed as far back as Aristotle and from within such unimpeachable American sources as James Madison’s Federalist 10. Given that this subject is not likely to go away […]
So far this mini-essay has read like a critical discussion comparing two methodological perspectives and little more. But research methodologies are important not just because of what they can be used to reveal to careful study, but also because of what they might unintentionally conceal. Think of the old saying “When the only tool you […]
A great many classical liberals and libertarians are attracted to methodological individualism because it seems compatible with ethical individualism. Here I will argue there is no particular connection in either direction. As an ethical approach to social life, no form of liberal thought has any need for methodological individualism. By contrast, adopting a position growing […]
Classical liberals with whom I have discussed these issues often appear to have a peculiarly strong emotional commitment to methodological individualism, the idea that all social phenomena can be reduced to the actions of individuals. I once shared this view, but without the emotional commitment. When I finally left it behind I became intrigued as […]
The Fall issue of Independent Review has my response to Timothy Sandefur’s essay “Some Problems With Spontaneous Order,” in its summer, 2009 issue. Unfortunately neither my critique nor Sandefur’s response are available yet without buying the journal, though that will change in 6 months. (But Independent Review can use the business so I hope you […]
The fateful alliance between classical liberals and conservatives was aided in part by their mutual attraction to arguments beginning in the Scottish Enlightenment and continuing through Edmund Burke, and later in economics, that reason alone could not plan a just society. As more egalitarian and managerially oriented liberals gravitated towards a more activist government as […]
I just read worrisome news reported by the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases and picked up by the British newspaper The Guardian. In its opinion the era of antibiotics is coming to a close, and coming fairly rapidly. In The Guardian Sarah Boseley described work by Prof. Tim Walsh who had discovered a gene which passes […]
Studies in Emergent Order 
April 17, 2011
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