One of the most intriguing propositions in the Social Sciences states that the social world as a whole is an unintended effect of individual actions. In the twentieth century, Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper famously took this theme up and developed it further. Following Carl Menger's early lead, Hayek worked out this theme's organicist and evolutionary aspects, assembling them under the notion of spontaneous order or catallaxy. Popper devoted himself mainly to criticism of the historicist extensions, which this idea had received in the hands of Marxists, notably the notion of a historical purpose. Generally speaking, a sort of division of labour emerged from this unplanned collaboration between Hayek and Popper, in which the former focused primarily on a positive project – the construction of the idea of a Great Society – whilst the latter was involved in the de-construction of historicism. Or so it seems.

It may be argued that both Hayek's and Popper's readings of the unintended consequences approach to social co-ordination reflect certain assumptions about social knowledge. In other words, if individual action typically produces repercussions that were not intended or foreseen, the knowledge that the individual actors may possess is deficient in a fundamental sense. This cognitive deficit – let us call it ignorance – confronted with the order that nonetheless emerges from actors’ interaction is the origin of their wonder (Hayek's in particular). The question naturally arises: How is it possible that ignorance coheres with co-ordination?

Hayek resorts to two auxiliary ideas to elaborate on the connection between ignorance and order: (1) the notion that evolving rules of conduct and social norms gradually and non-consciously provide the missing knowledge that individuals need to co-ordinate their actions; and (2) the idea of a perverse causation whereby major co-ordinating initiatives, originating not in evolving rules but in constructivist rationalism, are ‘punished’ by the emergence of the inverted consequence (and ultimately tyranny). Market society – where economic interaction is led by the market within the legal framework of the rule of law – is an instance of the former notion, whereas the interventionist state is an illustration of the latter.

However, one cannot safely assert that Popper endorses the connotation of ignorance supported by Hayek, let alone its political implications. In fact, it is this article's main contention that Popper sets out a political philosophy that advocates politics and government as the crucial action spheres in the legitimate ‘search of a better world’, and does so based precisely on the premise of ignorance. As a consequence, the set of arguments put forward by Popper may challenge both historicism and evolutionism as viable accounts of the ‘unintended consequences’ approach to the social order.

In order to build the argument, I shall make an appraisal of Hayek's approach to social co-ordination in Section 1. Upon inspection, the relationship between the epistemic starting point and the politico-normative conclusions emerges as a problematic one. On the one hand, the condition of ignorance rules out the possibility of the implementation of social reform. On the other, ignorance is not an impediment to Hayek's favourite market-orientated reforms, an ambiguity that Michael Oakeshott (Reference Oakeshott and Oakeshott1974) famously termed Hayek's anti-interventionist-interventionism. In Section 2, Popper's contribution is introduced by means of an assessment of his pertinent works. This assessment is more like a ‘rational reconstruction’, and is the major contribution of this paper; to the knowledge of the author, the ideas on this topic, scattered throughout Popper's lengthy work, have never before been collated as they are here.

In Subsection 2.1, I work out Popper's peculiar notion of ignorance, especially as it appears in the pieces on critical rationalism and objective knowledge. It turns out that, instead of understanding ignorance as a lack of knowledge that leads actors a-critically to follow rules, Popper's conception is associated with the faculty of invention. In Subsection 2.2, I investigate in his political writings whether the conception of ignorance as inventiveness finds a translation into the social and political environments – this is examined in relation to social technology and social engineering categories. Finally, Subsection 2.3 addresses Hayek's fears that the model of interventionism supported by Popper would give way to tyranny. It turns out that, for Popper, the sole interventionism that makes sense, given that knowledge is fallible, is democratic interventionism, i.e., interventionism which learns from its mistakes and, for all its defects, is deemed the best guarantee against dogmatism in power. In this subsection, economic interventionism is justified when it is bound to expand the equality of substantive freedoms in society, and not just lubricate the workings of a market economy.

Thus, Popper, in contrast to Hayek, appears to provide a number of reasons based on human fallibility for man's attempts to perfect the social world. Ergo, ignorance recommends intervention.

1. Hayek: order and spontaneity

In the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (CL), entitled ‘Why I am not a Conservative’, Hayek contended that ‘where spontaneous change has been smothered by government control, [Liberalism] wants a great deal of change of policy’ (Hayek, Reference Hayek1993: 399). This ‘policy of spontaneity’ is emblematic of the kind of tension between interventionism and conservatism that one finds in his politics. And yet, this is claimed by Hayek as the politico-normative consequence of certain facts concerning the making-up of the social world. Let me review the main lines of the argument.

As is well known, Hayek extracts from Adam Ferguson's historical account of the origin of institutions, in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), the historical observation upon which his social philosophy rests: ‘[n]ations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design’ (Hayek, Reference Hayek and Hayek1967: 96). In the seminal 1942–1944 (Reference Hayek and Hayek1979a) essay ‘Scientism and the Study of Society’, he builds on this conception so as to criticise social ‘scientism’. The latter is the intellectual attitude of supposing society to be an object similar to nature and, accordingly, overlooking the fact that social action produces emergent effects that hinder efforts to control them. The constructivist picture of the social order as the outcome of planning and design is an instance of social scientism. In opposition to this view, Hayek sets out the theory of spontaneous order, which takes note of this fact, and draws some conclusions regarding the possibility of intervention.

The frequent occurrence of unintended repercussions of one's actions in the social world is the major source of individual ignorance. An important consequence of this fact is that no synoptic perspective of the particular kind needed for constructivism is possible in it, and conversely, the sole knowledge of which individuals can be certain is local. And yet, however tricky social action and co-ordination may appear under this dim light, they are ultimately possible due to forms of knowledge that have been decanted into practical rules, institutions, and ways of behaving, which have evolved over time through spontaneous experimentation. However, these are, for the most part, implicit or tacit pieces of social information that cannot be fully articulated by the people who use them. As far as the social scientist goes, he may have his hints concerning the general principles on which this order seems to rely, but he is denied access both to the details, and, importantly, to prediction.Footnote ¹

Social action is thus cognitively dense, but the ability of consciousness and intentions – rationality as we know it – to bring about entire states of affairs is limited. In the end, Hayek grants Ferguson's dictum a social-epistemological justification: although the overall order is actually predicated on knowledge, the condition of limited conscious knowledge hampers anticipation of and control over the consequences of actions. Even though actors ‘make’ the world, design is simply not within their reach.

In this connection, social change occurs mainly as a result of changes initiated in external circumstances: ‘[e]very change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend throughout the whole of society’ (Hayek, Reference Hayek1989: 54/55). Secondly, taking advantage of the knowledge of the social scientist, changes may also occur as small adjustments made at the level of the more general and abstract rules with a view to enhancing their coherence. But a totally inappropriate additional source of change is collective action, i.e. the joint effort of a group of individuals aiming at some social change through common deliberation: ‘[t]he successful combination of knowledge and aptitude is not selected by common deliberation, by people seeking a solution to their problems through a joint effort . . .’ (Hayek, 1989: 55).

Thus, generally speaking, social interaction relying on evolving and mainly unwritten rules of conduct and social practices turns out to be, to an important extent, self-governed.

To be sure, the epistemic story of how social order is brought about also includes the emergence of laws in the sense of legal rules, but, at the same time, it demarcates their character. On this account, laws have typically resulted from protracted experimentation by social actors with a view to enhancing the predictability of social intercourse. As general facts that people may act upon, laws substitute predictability and generality for the arbitrariness and discretion that are bound to prevail in their absence, when ‘the control of the essential data of an individual's action is in another man's hands’ (Hayek, 1993: 139).

This is when government enters the stage. Government is needed to protect and enforce the law. Its existence and the coercion which it represents is, in other words, justified only to the extent that, by enforcing the law, it guards people against coercion from others and protects their liberty, in this rather negative sense. Coercion, in the sense of ‘control of the essential data of an individual's action by another. . .can be prevented only by enabling the individual to secure for himself some private sphere where he is protected against such interference. The assurance that he can count on certain facts not being deliberately shaped by another can be given to him only by some authority that has the necessary power’ (139). And this power should be limited to that which is strictly required to prevent abuse, otherwise discretion and arbitrariness would be promoted instead. Incidentally, the protection of individual freedom also allows individuals to avail themselves of the local and dispersed knowledge which they uniquely possess, and deepens the knowledge content of the overall order.

At this point, Hayek singles out a number of government activities such as the provision of public goods and the assurance of a social safety net that extend beyond the so-called negative sphere and certainly imply a measure of extra coercion, at least in the sense that these are funded by taxation. Acknowledging that state provision may be needed in view of ‘market failures’, Hayek considers their correction justifiable since it preserves some properties of the general laws. In particular, the proposed corrective coercion, to distinguish it from the protective one, is so general and well known as not to jeopardize the social actors’ horizon of predictability, and only works as a supplement – never as a substitute – for the spontaneously generated mechanism of co-ordination represented by the market, with the in-built freedom-preserving and universalistic features required of uncertainty-reducing laws.

These ideas had an early defence in The Road to Serfdom (RS), Hayek's critical piece, in Chapter IX, ‘Security and Freedom’, but were more fully stated in The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek's picture of the Great Society, especially in Chapter 9: ‘Coercion and the State’.

Nonetheless, ‘perfectionism’ inadvertently penetrates Hayek's system and generates imbalances in the relationship between ignorance and government. This is when his interventionism comes to the fore. In fact, it is out of Hayek's more detailed view of the corrective (and not just anti-coercion, protective) activities of government that the puzzle grows.

To begin with, in the ambit of the RS, Hayek seems disturbed by the privileges that are endorsed by a laissez-fairian political position, and defends a planned laissez-faire. It is perhaps his, by then, recalcitrant socialist sensitivity which makes him state that ‘there is. . .all the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are’ (Hayek, Reference Hayek1979b: 17). He is especially concerned with the occurrence of unjustifiable inequality of opportunities: ‘in a system of free enterprise, chances are not equal, since such a system is necessarily based on private property and (though perhaps not with the same necessity) on inheritance, with the differences in opportunity which these create. There is, indeed, a strong case for reducing this inequality of opportunity as far as congenital differences permit, and as it is possible to do so without destroying the impersonal character of the process by which everybody has to take his chance and no person's view about what is right overrules that of others’ (Hayek, 1979b: 102). Thus, the unfairness of the market appears to be one of the candidate circumstances for corrective intervention (conditioned on impersonality), i.e. the deliberate creation of a system of institutions.

Later, as he becomes less critical of market societies, his attitude and concerns regarding intervention grow more bold and problematical.

The position held in CL, and increasingly in his later work,Footnote ² now stresses that the social arrangements that have grown wealthier and more populous have thus proved to be superior to others, their rules and laws more cogent. Incidentally, these are those of liberal market-oriented societies. Various kinds of corrective intervention are then validated, which aimed at either restoring interrupted instructions of ‘spontaneity’Footnote ³ or directly enhancing efficiency. In CL, for example, he affirms that ‘[t]here is ample scope for experimentation and improvement within that permanent legal framework which makes it possible for a society to operate most efficiently’ (Hayek, 1993: 231). The growth of wealth and technological knowledge are taken here as the representation of efficiency, and thus the justification for intervention. The list in Chapter 15 on ‘Economic Policy and the Rule of Law’ is quite impressive, and so are his efficiency-driven proposals of constitutional reform and intervention to improve monetary institutions later in the seventies.Footnote ⁴ Thus, in addition to protective coercion, market inefficiency is also advocated as a circumstance recommending intervention.

In this connection, and more controversially, the inequalities of opportunity that concerned him earlier are now seen as having an efficiency function and hence are no longer a cause for concern. In the chapter on ‘Equality’ in CL, Hayek relates inequality of opportunities (in the sense of inequalities of ‘nature and nurture’) to efficiency or the ‘true interest of society’ (Hayek, 1993: 91). Referring to the importance of family and the institution of bequest, he now notes that ‘belonging to a particular family is part of the individual personality. . .and that the transmission of the heritage of civilization within the family is as important a tool in man's striving toward better things as is the heredity of beneficial attributes’ (90). Symmetrically, efforts aiming at altering the system of rules embodied in liberal societies, especially the (by definition discretionary) attempts at social justice, remain appraised as destined to be perverted, and to destroy the spontaneous mechanism whereby such arrangements have been achieved, and are, for this reason, condemned.

On balance, the perfectionist element – which now appears as the unqualified defence of efficiency, for which an impersonal system of rules is instrumental – is in conflict with the ignorance argument. It is not only the general character of the rule – and hence its protective function – which commends it and justifies the intervention, but also a more specific and concrete task that it is able to deliver, i.e. serving efficiency. In fact, in order to improve the efficiency of the aforementioned arrangements, Hayek advocates the addition of specific amendments to their general laws. ‘[T]he satisfactory working of a free economy’ is now assumed to require much more than the mere observation of the rule of law, ‘the prevention of violence and fraud, the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts, and the recognition of equal rights of all individuals to produce whatever quantities and sell at whatever prices they choose’ (220).

General rules must be ‘given a form’, he proposes, ‘in order that the market mechanism will work as effectively and as beneficially as possible’ (229). Clearly, this may entail big government, as he himself admits (and downplays): ‘it is the character rather than the volume of government that is important’ (220). However, it is taken for granted here that efficiency-driven intervention – the specific ‘form’, and then the ‘volume’ – is not likely to conflict with the impersonal mechanism of information co-ordination, i.e. the general rules. But this is not warranted and, as far as our discussion goes, this seems to be a critical step. It is one thing to state that the impersonal mechanism delivers not only co-ordination but also some kind of efficiency, another to state that efficiency-enhancing initiatives are necessarily compatible with it, and still another to claim that the latter ought to be pursued.

In this connection, part of what remains to be demonstrated is why these multiple interventions are not supposed to have the distortionary effects that social justice intervention has; the other part is why efficiency should be pursued prior to – or even at the cost of – other large-scale social ends. Clearly, Hayek's rather curious account of the demands of social justice – which, he says, ‘involve arbitrary discrimination between persons’ or ‘decisions as to who is allowed to provide different services or commodities, at what prices or in what quantities’ (227) – can only provide a partial response. For it is, at least, arguable that this is not an accurate description of the ideals of social justice at large: John Rawls's conception of ‘justice as fairness’, for example, involves procedural, rather than end-state, justice, and it aims at the basic structure of society, not specific persons or groups.Footnote ⁵ And, at any rate, as we multiply the instances of intervention and move from the general character of the law to the specifics – targeted at efficiency to the detriment of other goals – the cognitive criterion to tell legitimate from illegitimate intervention loses much of its strength.

It seems useful to disentangle two related issues. The first, the normative issue, has to do with the simple fact that any intervention aims at a certain end or set of ends – which, in the earlier Hayek, included the promotion of a ‘fair market order’, and, in the later, the requirements of an ‘efficient market’. What is it, after all, that the impersonal mechanism of the co-ordination of dispersed knowledge really requires or coheres with or still overrules? The variety of answers that Hayek himself provides suggests that the theme is controversial, and certainly a determinate solution cannot be found from the cognitive starting point in ignorance alone. And yet, concerning the ideal of an efficient market order, Hayek advocates it as though it were implied by the impersonal and spontaneous mechanism of social co-ordination.Footnote ⁶

The related cognitive issue has to do with prediction. Here, a disturbing implication of Hayek's perfectionism emerges. His insistence on the articulation of large-scale ends, which are immanent to the market order and which intervention ought to serve, might align him with an extraction of social scientism which he had rejected precisely on cognitive grounds: the rational constructivism of Quesnay and the Phisiocrats.Footnote ⁷ To recall, perfectionist intervention neglects the problem of ignorance over the consequences: how can one know that a particular intervention is going to produce the desired results?

Overall, the relationship between limited knowledge and government appears problematical. Since consequences cannot be known beforehand, maximum restraint is recommended – as in Hayek's defence of protective government. And yet the results of intervention of a certain kind are predictably bad, as they endanger a better future of which we have foreknowledge. Thus, counter-intervention and positive efficiency-enhancing government – intervention of another kind – are urged: ‘what is most urgently needed in most parts of the world is a thorough sweeping away of the obstacles to free growth’ (Hayek, 1993: 399). But how can these be immune to the ignorance predicament?

To clarify, the point is not that disasters cannot be predicted and large-scale ends wished for, but that once we decide to follow Ferguson's lead, we need an argument that makes these cohere with ignorance. Thus, two questions must be addressed in order to tell good from bad intervention: (1) what the epistemic possibility is of any intervention; (2) how to undertake such a project without committing some sort of social determinism with regard to the purposes of intervention – in other words, how to decide which ends are worth pursuing or which are not.

It is to a proposed way out of these problems that we now turn.

2. Popper in search of a better world

In his political philosophical work, Popper, in contrast to Hayek, remains a bold defender of interventionism. This has already been noticed by a number of commentators, even by Hayek himself, in spite of the myriad pronouncements by both himself and Popper regarding their strong intellectual affinity.Footnote ⁸ The specific contribution of this section, however, is to show that Popper presents his case for intervention as an outcome of views on the state of human knowledge comparable to those of Hayek, producing as a result the positive connection – prima facie denied by Hayek – between ignorance and design. I shall argue this point by putting together different parts of Popper's writings, both philosophical as well as political, and showing that these are components of a coherent view on the issue of the connection between ignorance and intervention.

I shall reconstruct Popper's argument in two stages. First, I shall offer an interpretation of his peculiar notion of ignorance via an assessment of three intertwined themes that occur in his philosophical writings: critical rationalism, tradition, and invention. Then, I shall track, in the last two sections, what appears to be the implications of this notion when it comes to institutional design and government, and the relevant contrasts with Hayek.