Hayek inherited stadial-history assumptions from the Scottish Enlightenment via figures like Lorimer.

Evidence

Although Lorimer drew on pseudo-biological theories to advance arguments that were more explicitly racist than those of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson or their contemporaries, he nonetheless adopted their basic evolutionary assumption that civil society gradually developed from the ‘savage’ condition of tribal existence to the ‘polished’ life of a commercial society. Like Hayek, who drew on such stadial histories to develop his account of the morals of the market, Lorimer saw the extension of the division of labour as integral to the process of civilisation. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s project: ties Hayek’s market-morals theory to the racist natural-law lineage it descended from — a link between the human-rights critique and market ethics debate.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: exactly how much of Lorimer’s hierarchical natural law does Hayek retain when he uses stadial history, and what does Hayek do with its explicitly racist element?