Emergent Politics and the Power of Ideas

The advent of public choice throws a wrench in the Hayekian vision of an order/market vs. organization/state dichotomy. Polities are emergent just as markets are. The simple argument that markets are decentralized knowledge-aggregators and polities are not is no longer prima facia acceptable. The fundamental problem thus needs to be restated as a comparative institutional one. This paper argues that markets have tight feedback from the extended order, while polities do not, and thus that ideas matter more in politics than markets.

Find article at Studies in Emergent Order.