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This article explores the notions of order and process to which Friedrich Hayek
subscribed. It is argued that a satisfactory understanding of Hayek’s conceptions of
‘order’ and ‘process’—and in particular a clear understanding of those how the two
concepts relate to each other in his scheme of thought—requires an appreciation of
the ontological categories of ‘emergence’ and ‘emergent properties’. Ultimately, for
Hayek the capacity of liberal market economies to co-ordinate people’s actions in
the face of tacit and dispersed knowledge is an emergent property that arises only
when people’s interactions are governed by certain sets of rules. This static analysis
of the co-ordinative powers of the market as an emergent property of a given system
of rules must be supplemented by a dynamic account of the process through which
the set of rules in question comes into being. Hayek provides such an account in
his account of society as developing through a multi-level evolutionary process. Key
implications of Hayek’s accounts of order and process for debates about the coordinative
powers of free market economies are drawn out.
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