Nobody Designed the English Language, and Hayek Called That Spontaneous Order

Who invented English? Go ahead, name the committee. There is no committee. No ministry drew up the grammar, no board approved the spelling, and no regulator signed off on the verb "to google." Hundreds of millions of people use the language as a native tongue, and many more use it as a second one, and it works well enough that two strangers from different continents can argue about a ballgame in it. Not one person designed it.

Now ask the next question. If a language that can express a sonnet and a tax code arose without a designer, why do we assume that an economy, a legal system or a family structure requires one? That question is the doorway into one of Friedrich Hayek's most important ideas, and the one most useful to a conservative. He called it spontaneous order. Let me define it, give the examples, and then say what it should make us do and refuse to do.

The old phrase behind the idea

Hayek did not coin the key distinction. He borrowed it, with credit, from the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society of 1767, wrote that nations stumble upon establishments which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. Hayek loved that sentence and quoted it for decades.

It carves out a category that our everyday vocabulary lacks. We tend to sort things into two bins: the natural, which nobody made, and the artificial, which somebody designed. Ferguson says there is a third bin, and it holds most of what matters about civilization: things made by human beings but not by human plan. Language. Law. Money. Markets. Manners. Moral rules. Each is the product of millions of people acting for their own reasons over generations, and each has a structure no one intended.

Cosmos and taxis

In Law, Legislation and Liberty, a three-volume work published between 1973 and 1979, Hayek gave the two kinds of order Greek names so that we would stop confusing them.

Taxis is a made order, an arrangement deliberately constructed to serve a purpose. An army, a corporation, a household budget and a government agency are taxes. They have a commander or a designer, and they are judged by whether they achieve the goals set for them. Because someone had to hold the whole plan in mind, a taxis can only be as complex as one mind or one committee can grasp.

Cosmos is a grown order, one that arises from the interaction of its elements following general rules without anyone directing the result. A language, a market, the common law and a city's pattern of neighborhoods are cosmoses. They have no single purpose, because they serve the many different purposes of the many people in them. And because no one has to hold the whole in mind, a cosmos can be far more complex than anything anyone could design.

Hayek's point is not that cosmoses are good and taxes bad. Taxes are indispensable inside a free society: your church, your firm, your local government. His point is that a free society as a whole is a cosmos, and that governing it as though it were a giant taxis is a category mistake with terrible consequences.

Four examples

Let us go through the cases Hayek returned to again and again, so the idea becomes concrete.

Language. No one decided that "knight" would keep its silent letters or that "ain't" would be frowned upon. Meanings shift, words are born and die, and the rules are enforced only by usage: you are understood or you are not. English absorbed Old English, Norse, Norman French and Latin over a thousand years, and the grab bag works. Dictionaries record the order; they do not create it. Dr. Johnson published his Dictionary in 1755, and the language went on changing anyway.

The common law. English judges, and later American ones, decided disputes between actual parties, and over time their decisions settled into rules that were stable, general and predictable. No legislature enacted the law of contract or negligence in its original form. Judges found rules that worked, because rules that did not work generated more disputes. Blackstone and Burke both prized this process as a store of experience. Hayek agreed, and noted that the judge's job is to discover and apply rules, not to impose a plan.

Money. Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school, argued in 1871 and again in a later essay that money was not invented by a king or a council. It emerged because people trading in barter found that some goods were easier to pass on than others, and gradually everyone began accepting the most marketable good, simply because everyone else would. Metals won out. The state later minted the coins and eventually monopolized the supply, but the institution came first. We trace that school of thought in The Austrian school in plain words, from Carl Menger to Friedrich Hayek.

Markets. A price is a signal that compresses an enormous amount of scattered knowledge into a single number. When tin becomes scarcer, its price rises, and users of tin around the world economize, without any of them needing to know why. Hayek made this famous in his 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," published in the American Economic Review, where he argued that the economic problem is not how to allocate known resources but how to use knowledge that is dispersed among millions of people and never exists in concentrated form. No central planner could collect it, and the price system does the job as a by-product of people minding their own affairs. Ludwig von Mises had shown the same gap from another angle, covered in Mises Showed in 1920 That Socialism Cannot Calculate a Single Price.

Why these orders hold more knowledge than any designer

Here is the central argument, put as numbered premises.

1. Much of the knowledge needed to run a society is local, tacit and fleeting: what the shopkeeper knows about his street, what the farmer knows about his field, what the nurse knows about her ward.
2. That knowledge cannot be gathered into one place, because much of it cannot even be put into words, and it changes faster than reports can travel.
3. A grown order uses this knowledge automatically, because each participant acts on what he knows and adjusts to signals from others.
4. A designed order can use only the knowledge the designer has, which is a sliver of the whole.
5. Therefore, in matters of great complexity, a spontaneous order will usually outperform a designed one, and an attempt to replace the first with the second will destroy knowledge it cannot replace.

Notice what the argument does not say. It does not say that planners are wicked. It says they are finite. Adam Smith's man of system, who imagines he can arrange a society like pieces on a chessboard, fails for want of information, before he fails for want of virtue. We read that passage in Before The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Wrote a Book About Conscience.

The strongest objection, answered

A thoughtful critic will say the following, and he deserves a straight answer.

Spontaneous orders are not always good. Language drifts into jargon. Markets produce monopolies and pollution. Customary law once upheld slavery and the subjection of women. If we trusted grown orders, we would never have abolished any injustice. Reform is deliberate design, and nobody would give up civil rights law or public sanitation because Hayek said institutions grow by themselves.

Fair. Here is the reply in four points.

1. Hayek never said every grown order is good. He said grown orders contain knowledge designers lack, so the burden of proof falls on the redesigner. Evolution produces dead ends as well as triumphs, and he said so.
2. Reform is not the enemy; blueprint is. Most great reforms worked by improving the rules within an existing order, not by replacing the order. The Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish the common law; it removed one rule that contradicted the Declaration. Piecemeal reform, tested against experience, is what Burke defended and what we endorse in Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing.
3. Rules designed to be general are different from plans. A statute that says no one may defraud another is a rule within a cosmos. A statute that says this industry shall produce this quantity at this price is a taxis imposed on a cosmos. The first helps the order; the second replaces it. Telling them apart is the heart of the rule of law, as we discuss in The Rule of Law Has Eight Marks, and Lawmakers Can Fail at Every One.
4. The comparison is with the alternatives actually on offer. Command economies were designed, with enormous care and resources, and delivered shortages and stagnation. That does not prove no design is ever wise. It shows the burden of proof is heavy.

Why this makes conservatives humble

The practical lesson is a posture. Before you tear down an institution, ask what it does. Chesterton gave the classic form of this in his fence parable: if you come upon a fence across a road and cannot see the use of it, you should not remove it until you have found out why it was put there. Hayek supplies the reason. A fence that survived long enough to reach you has probably been doing something that its builders understood and you do not. We make the broader case in Chesterton Called Tradition the Democracy of the Dead, and He Was Right.

That posture produces some concrete habits.

• Prefer general rules to specific commands. A rule that applies to everyone alike leaves the order free to adapt. A command picks winners and requires its author to know more than he can.
• Reform at the margin and watch the result. Small experiments, preferably at the state or local level, risk little and teach much. Federalism is Hayek's argument made into a constitution, with fifty laboratories rather than one lab.
• Distrust the word "reorganize." When someone proposes to remake the health system, the energy grid or the school curriculum in one stroke, ask what knowledge the old arrangement was carrying and how he plans to replace it.
• Protect the small orders. Families, congregations, neighborhoods and clubs are grown orders too. They are the places where much of what a society knows about living well is stored.

The Founders did not use Hayek's vocabulary, but their design reflects a kindred caution about concentrated power and knowledge. Article I vests in Congress only the legislative powers herein granted, and the Tenth Amendment reserves the rest to the states or the people. That is a constitution designed to prevent any one design from governing everything. It lets the cosmos run.

English, after all, did not need an Academy. It needed speakers. A free society, by the same logic, needs citizens and general rules, and it is at its best when the people in charge remember how much they do not know.

The case in brief

1. Spontaneous order, a term Hayek took from Adam Ferguson's 1767 observation, names institutions that are the result of human action but not of human design: language, common law, money and markets.
2. In Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek distinguished cosmos, a grown order, from taxis, a made one, and warned against governing a free society as if it were a single organization.
3. Grown orders hold dispersed, tacit knowledge that no planner can gather, as Hayek's 1945 essay on the use of knowledge argued.
4. The objection that grown orders can be unjust is answered by distinguishing reform within the rules from blueprint replacement, and by putting the burden of proof on the redesigner.
5. The conservative lesson is humility: prefer general rules, reform at the margin, keep decisions near the people who hold the knowledge, and find the purpose of a fence before removing it.

What you can do: before the next local ballot measure or school board proposal that promises to overhaul something in one stroke, ask the sponsor in writing what the current arrangement does well and how the plan will keep it.