The Place of Gestalt Psychology in the Making of Hayek's Thought

Abstract

Since its publication in 1952, Friedrich von Hayek’s The Sensory Order has captured the attention of scholars of the cognitive processes to the point that it is now viewed as an important stage in the development of the cognitive sciences. However, it has only lately and with some difficulty come within the social scientists’ range of interest. Until the beginning of the 1990s social scientists were attracted to Hayek’s notion of knowledge, which he saw as limited and dispersed among individuals ([1937] 1948; [1945] 1948); to his idea that competition was a process of discovery, that is, that competition transmits personal knowledge throughout the economy ([1968] 1978); and to his belief that social phenomena are complex phenomena, that they are overall structures possessing distinct characteristic properties independent of the particular properties of the elements that compose them ([1964] 1967). Apart from rare exceptions, it is only in the past ten years that they have been paying increasing attention to The Sensory Order and investigating the connection between Hayek’s reflections on mental processes and his thoughts on the formation and evolution of social systems. It can certainly be said that Hayek’s affirmation in the preface to The Sensory Order—that the book is both a work of “theoretical psychology,” independent of his research on society, and at the same time a