The Problem of Organisations in Hayekian Liberalism

Hayek founds his liberalism on the notion of order, principally used to construct his theory of spontaneous market order. After discussing the importance and the ambiguities of the distinction between spontaneous orders and organized orders, we show that one of the great weaknesses of this theory is that it could not integrate consistently the two types of order. Hayekian spontaneous market is incompatible with complex organizations (non-atomistic organized orders) and could be constituted only by simple organizations (atomistic organized orders). Our conclusion is not that the notion of spontaneous order is meaningless per se: only its theoretical construction by Hayek and the normative implications he derives from it are criticized here.