Hayek located rationality in impersonal market processes, not individuals

Evidence

For Hayek and other advocates of “emergent” social cognition, true rational thought is impersonal, but can occur only between and beyond the individual agents who putatively do the thinking. As he wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, “to act rationally we often find it necessary to be guided by habit rather than reflection.” As Christian Arnsperger so aptly put it, for Hayek, “rational judgment can only be uttered by a Great Nobody.” That may seem odd in someone superficially tagged as a methodological individualist supporter of freedom; but it just goes to show how far ignorance has become ingrained in American political discourse. The trick lies in comprehending how Hayek could harbor such a jaundiced view of the average individual, while simultaneously elevating “knowledge” to pride of place in the economic pantheon: Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 223

Categorization

• QUESTION: How Hayek reconciled contempt for individual reason with a ‘knowledge’ premium is left open — a thread worth chasing.
• XREF: connects to: Hayek grounded free-market economics in a theory of human ignorance — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 278; Oakeshott saw Hayek’s anti-planning stance as itself a form of rationalism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 295; Hayek rejected utility maximization in favor of knowledge dispersion as the market’s justification — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1926 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• Hayek’s market argument rests on an epistemology of dispersed tacit knowledge #expands (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 72
• Rationality in social theory attaches to systems and functions, not individual decisions #expands (0.85) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 308
• Hayek justified markets by dispersed knowledge, not happiness maximization #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2195
• Hayek modeled economic order on rules operating without being known #corroborates (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 172
• Hayek argued contextual individual knowledge cannot be statistically aggregated #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 211
• Hayek framed individual rational self-direction as dangerous civilizational hubris #contradicts (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 227
• Hayek grounded freedom in the inevitability of ignorance #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 221