GATT legal experts scaled Hayek’s cognitive hierarchy to world economic order
Evidence
It is striking that at the turn of the 1980s, before the role of cybernetics in Hayek’s thought had even been acknowledged by scholars, Hayek and the GATT legal experts were writing from a shared perspective on hierarchical systems of communication and conduct. In the work of the neoliberal experts in Geneva, the multitiered metaphor that Hayek used for cognition was scaled up to rethink world economic order. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 833
Categorization
- QUESTION: This anticipates later scholarship on cybernetics in Hayek (Mirowski etc.) — worth checking when that acknowledgment actually arrived and who made it.
- SEED: Essay angle: how a theorist’s metaphor (cognition as layered hierarchy) gets literally scaled up into an architectural principle for global governance — metaphor migration across levels of analysis.
- XREF: connects to: Hayekian economists occupied the most influential reform positions at GATT. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 799; Neoliberal Geneva experts adopted Hayek’s cybernetic systems view of world order — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 831
Broader Connections
- Neoliberal Geneva experts adopted Hayek’s cybernetic systems view of world order
#expands(0.85) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 831