Economics and Philosophy

Table of Contents - 1986 - Volume 2, Issue 01  

Essays

Spontaneous Market Order and Social Rules

A Critical Examination of F. A. Hayek's Theory of Cultural Evolution

Viktor Vanberga1

a1 Department of Economics, George Mason University

Discoverers of “market failures” as well as advocates of the general efficiency of a “true, unhampered market” sometimes seem to disregard the fundamental fact that there is no such thing as a “market as such.” What we call a market is always a system of social interaction characterized by a specific institutional framework, that is, by a set of rules defining certain restrictions on the behavior of the market participants, whether these rules are informal, enforced by private sanctions, or formal, enforced by a particular agency, the “protective state,” in J. M. Buchanan's (1975) terminology.