Abstract
ABSTRACT This article presents a narrative on the emergence of the concept of complexity in Friedrich A. Hayek’s work. We show that complexity emerges from Hayek’s methodological concerns and, specifically, from his texts that compose the first two parts of the Abuse of Reason Project. Namely, a) ‘Individualism: True and False’, from 1946; b) ‘Scientism and the Study of Society’, published between 1942 and 1944; and c) ‘The Counter Revolution of Science’, from 1941. In this paper, we aim to expose that the concept of complexity emerges gradually and organically and is integrated with the Hayekian research program from the 1940s.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONThe initial structure of the project is divided into four parts: (i) the first should be a study of the eighteenth-century individualist theories — which in Hayek’s preliminary results became ‘Individualism: True and False‘ (1946); (ii) the second was planned as an investigation of the intellectual sources of the hostility to such philosophy of individualism; (iii) the third should deal with how this hostility, the rise of reason, has historically developed in countries such as France, Germany, and the United States – (ii) and (iii) resulted in ‘The Counter-Revolution of Science’ (1941), ‘Scientism and the Study of Society‘ (1942-44), and ‘Comte and Hegel’ (1951); and (iv) the fourth and final part was envisioned as a discussion of the abuse and fall of reason under authoritarian regimes, from which his most popular book, The Road of Serfdom (1944), was originated
Complexity in Hayek’s economic, methodological, and social philosophical thought is associated with the dispersed, subjective, and tacit knowledge possessed by human beings in the context of social phenomena
The difference is that we aim to study the first part of this narrative from texts explicitly associated by Caldwell (2004a, chapter 11) with the Abuse of Reason Project in the 1940s
Summary
The initial structure of the project is divided into four parts: (i) the first should be a study of the eighteenth-century individualist theories — which in Hayek’s preliminary results became ‘Individualism: True and False‘ (1946); (ii) the second was planned as an investigation of the intellectual sources of the hostility to such philosophy of individualism; (iii) the third should deal with how this hostility, the rise of reason, has historically developed in countries such as France, Germany, and the United States – (ii) and (iii) resulted in ‘The Counter-Revolution of Science’ (1941), ‘Scientism and the Study of Society‘ (1942-44), and ‘Comte and Hegel’ (1951); and (iv) the fourth and final part was envisioned as a discussion of the abuse and fall of reason under authoritarian regimes, from which his most popular book, The Road of Serfdom (1944), was originated
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