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Cosmos; emergent order; Hayek; spontaneous order; taxis

Written by Brandon Klein | Dec 16, 2013 2:48:29 PM

COSMOS+TAXIS takes its inspiration from Friedrich Hayek’s (1979) distinction between spontaneous and planned orders. A spontaneous order, as Gus diZerega explains in the open- ing article, evolves in an orderly but unplanned fashion be- cause of the presence of shared rules, simplified feedback, and status equality among the order’s participants. Though the most studied instantiation is the market order, this jour- nal is concerned with the broad manifold of spontaneous orders. Michael Polanyi (1962) used the term “spontaneous order” to explicate the evolution of science, while diZerega (1989) extended its application to democracy as distin- guished from the traditional authoritarian nation state, the largest-scale example of a taxis.