Toward a Hayekian Theory of Social Change compiles various essays relating to Friedrich Hayek’s work on social change. Hayek is an interesting academic in the sense that his work goes beyond traditional economics to examine social phenomena more broadly. Being relevant to many fields and a major figure in economics, Hayek has been analyzed by a vast number of scholars. That should raise an important question for any reader of this book. Are there enough valuable things to be said about Hayek to justify another volume on his thought? If the book was just a series of restatements, perhaps you could say “no.” However, I believe the essays answer with a resounding “yes” because the authors do not just restate his arguments. Instead, they show how to use Hayek’s ideas and framework to answer new questions across different fields. That is not an easy task since Hayek rarely applied his theory to specific cases or examples.

Hayek is most often associated with the Austrian School of Economics and wrote on business cycles, critiques of central planning, and the role of tacit knowledge. In 1974, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. His achievements in the field of economics alone are enough to make him a scholar worth returning to. That being said, the importance of Hayek’s work extends far beyond economics. The ideas of emergent and spontaneous order apply to and have influenced many fields including political science and sociology. The chapters in this book reflect new ways to apply those ideas. While each is written to be accessible to all readers, a background on Hayek’s understanding of emergent and spontaneous orders will enrich the reading.

With any collected work, you should ask what is the through line. Unlike the title suggestion, these essays do not build one coherent Hayekian theory. Instead, these are better thought of as a series of explanations regarding how the core ideas in Hayek’s thinking relate to different fields or as direct applications of the framework to study specific cases. In the introduction, the editors state the core ideas running through the essays:

At the core, Hayek’s work was concerned with social change. As he wrote in his seminal essay “The Use of Knowledge and Society”: “Economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change.” ... Hayek believed that social change comes from neither the actions of pathbreaking entrepreneurs upsetting the status quo nor of policymakers steering society in a desired direction. Instead, social change arises from many different individuals interacting in social processes in an institutional setting consisting of interdependent rules. (p. 1)

They go on to highlight the importance of viewing social phenomena as “complex”—meaning that the interaction of elements of a system lead to phenomena that are not reduceable to the individual elements.

Unlike natural science, the fundamental elements of a social system are people who act in accordance with their own plans and purposes. The interactions of real individuals lead to the spontaneous orders which Hayek discusses (see Daniel D’Amico, Spontaneous Order, in Christopher J. Coyne and Peter Boettke [eds.], The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics, Oxford Academic, 2015). One of Hayek’s central insights is that as individuals go about their lives, they react to and generate knowledge from interactions. People then converge on predictable patterns of behavior which allow better informed planning in the future. The predictability is the order. It is spontaneous insofar as it was not designed by any one person or group of people. This view contrasts with understandings which model society as a series of interacting macro variables and/or view society as being intentionally constructed. In Hayek’s framework, spontaneous order can be quite stable, but there is also an inherent ability to change. Because people are always generating and reacting to new knowledge of time and place, orders which spontaneously emerged can also spontaneously change. That is true even if change occurs over a long period of time. The order which spontaneously emerges does so precisely because emergent rules allow for coordination. Now, that order might not be the best possible order, but that is a different question than why social orders exist and change.

Taking the Hayekian view seriously means individuals cannot fully understand how and why a system works. We can model the micro-interactions and describe different systematic trends, but we may not be able to understand why a system works the exact way it does. Centralized planning whether in the economy or the society more generally is impossible for this reason. Anyone who attempts to do so will lack the relevant tacit knowledge leading to unintended consequences. Often, they are negative.

The authors of the book represent different fields to which Hayek’s ideas on spontaneous orders are valuable. Some of the chapters deal with more standard economic questions such as economic growth, entrepreneurship, and gifts as a substitute for money. There are also chapters dealing with law, building on Hayek’s treatment in The Constitution of Liberty (Routledge, [1960] 2020)and Law, Legislation and Liberty (Routledge, [1973] 2022). Craig Lyons in particular compares Hayek’s story on development of law with the actual historical record of how the common law developed in Medieval Ireland. Those pieces are excellent although natural extensions of a broader Hayekian project. More surprising are the chapters by Samuel Schmitt and Kayleigh Thompson. Schmitt claims environmental arguments against large-scale farming are actually compatible with the Hayekian focus on local knowledge, leading to a support for smaller, local farming. Thompson draws on the Austrian tradition’s work on culture to analyze microenterprises in the Caribbean. She connects the Austrian view to feminist literature because both emphasize how subjective perceptions shape people’s actions. Because of that, studying the effects of gendered institutions is vital for understanding the Caribbean’s development.

Another aspect holds these chapters together: their approach. You will not find a slew of regression tables which have become so common in the social sciences. Instead, you will find rich analyses of cultural context. Even in the more theory-oriented chapters, the authors deal with the complex realities instead of oversimplified models of human behavior. In that, the authors address the problem raised on the back cover of the book, “Arguably one limitation of Hayek’s social philosophy is that he, as some of contemporaries quipped, does not know the words ‘for example.’” This book is a series of wonderful applications of and expansions on the core idea of spontaneous order mechanisms to different fields. It serves not only to signal that the Hayekian project is still worth engaging in but as examples of good research by young scholars. They ask interesting questions and answer those questions without sacrificing understanding the complexity of the world in order to fit a clean concise model. Making that sacrifice would be to disregard all the lessons Hayek was trying to teach us.