This table is meant to clarify the distinction between taxis (“made order”) and cosmos (“grown order”), two forms of order as described by F. A. Hayek in Law, Legislation and Liberty: Volume One, Rules and Order (The University of Chicago Press, 1973). According to Hayek, “Classical Greek was more fortunate in possessing distinct single words for the two kinds of order, namely taxis for a made order, such as, for example, an order of battle, and kosmos for a grown order, meaning originally ‘a right order in a state or a community.’”[9]

[1] “The first answer to which our anthropomorphic habits of thought almost inevitably lead us is that it must be due to the design of some thinking mind. And because order has been generally interpreted as such a deliberate arrangement by somebody, the concept has become unpopular among most friends of liberty and has been favored by authoritarians. According to this interpretation of order in society must rest on a relation of command and obedience, or a hierarchical structure of the whole of society in which the will of superiors, and ultimately of some single supreme authority, determines what each individual must do.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 37.

[2] “The grown order … is in English most conveniently described as a spontaneous order.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 37. “Since a spontaneous order results from the individual elements adapting themselves to circumstances which directly affect only some of them, and which in their totality need not be known to anyone, it may extend to circumstances so complex that no mind can comprehend them all. … Since we can know at most the rules observed by the elements of various kinds of which the structures are made up, but not all the individual elements and never all the particular circumstances in which each of them is placed, our knowledge will be restricted to the general character of the order which will form itself. And even where, as is true of a society of human beings, we may be in a position to alter at least some of the rules of conduct which the elements obey, we shall thereby be able to influence only the general character and not the detail of the resulting order.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 41.

[3] “[This] view holds that human institutions will serve human society only if they have been deliberately designed for these purposes, often also that the fact that an institution exists is evidence of its having been created for a purpose, and always that we should so re-design society and its institutions that all our actions will be wholly guided by known purposes.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 8-9.

[4] “[This] view, which has slowly and gradually advanced since antiquity but for a time was almost entirely overwhelmed by the more glamorous constructivist view, was that that orderliness of society which greatly increased the effectiveness of individual action was not due solely to institutions and practices which had been invented or designed for that purpose, but was largely due to a process described at first as ‘growth’ and later as ‘evolution,’ a process in which practices which had first been adopted for other reasons, or even purely accidentally, were preserved because they enabled the group in which they had arisen to prevail over others.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 9.

[5] “[The] authoritarian connotation of the concept of order derives … entirely from the belief that order can be created only by forces outside the system (or ‘exogenously’).” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 36.

[6] “[The authoritarian connotation of the concept of order] does not apply to an equilibrium set up from within (or ‘endogenously’) such as that which the general theory of the market endeavors to explain.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 36.

[7] “Most important … is the relation of a spontaneous order to the conception of purpose. Since such an order has not been created by an outside agency, the order as such also can have no purpose, although its existence may be very serviceable to the individuals which move within such order. But in a different sense it may well be said that the order rests on purposive action of its elements, when ‘purpose’ would, of course, mean nothing more than that their actions tend to secure the preservation and restoration of that order. The ‘purposive’ in this sense as a sort of ‘teleological’ shorthand’, as it as been called by biologists, is unobjectionable so long as we do not imply an awareness of purpose of the part of the elements, but mean merely that the elements have acquired regularities of conduct conducive to the maintenance of the order—presumably because those who did act in certain ways had within the resulting order a better chance of survival than those who did not. In general, however, it is preferable to avoid in this connection the term ‘purpose’ and to speak instead of ‘function’.” Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 39.

[8] All citations in this post are to this version of the book.

[9] Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty at p. 37.