“Emergent Politics and the Power of Ideas”
Studies in Emergent Order, Vol. 3 (2010)
Abstract
The advent of public choice throws a wrench in the Hayekian vision of an order/market vs. organization/state dichotomy. Polities are emergent just as markets are. The simple argument that markets are decentralized knowledge-aggregators and polities are not is no longer prima facia acceptable. The fundamental problem thus needs to be restated as a comparative institutional one. This paper argues that markets have tight feedback from the extended order, while polities do not, and thus that ideas matter more in politics than markets.