The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Book 1)

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Indeed, if our present order did not already exist we too might hardly believe any such thing could ever be possible, and dismiss any report about it as a tale of the miraculous, about what could never come into being. What are chiefly responsible for having generated this extraordinary order, and the existence of mankind in its present size and structure, are the rules of human conduct that gradually evolved (especially those dealing with several property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain, and privacy). These rules are handed on by tradition, teaching and imitation, rather than by instinct, and largely consist of prohibitions (‘shalt not’s’) that designate adjustable domains for individual decisions.

Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interaction comes into existence through a process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our vision or our capacity to design. Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His ‘invisible hand’ had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern. We are led – for example by the pricing system in market exchange – to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware

Social Darwinism is wrong in many respects, but the intense dislike of it shown today is also partly due to its conflicting with the fatal conceit that man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.

The ‘possessive individualism’ of John Locke was, for example, not just a political theory but the product of an analysis of the conditions to which England and Holland owed their prosperity. It was based in the insight that the justice that political authority must enforce, if it wants to secure the peaceful cooperation among individuals on which prosperity rests, cannot exist without the recognition of private property: ‘“Where there is no property there is no justice,” is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid: for the idea of property being a right to anything,

The more one learns about economic history, the more misleading then seems the belief that the achievement of a highly organised state constituted the culmination of the early development of civilisation. The role played by governments is greatly exaggerated in historical accounts because we necessarily know so much more about what organised government