Don’t call it a liveblog, but I will attempt to post quotes from Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty a bit more chronologically. And here is one, from Chapter 1 of the first book:
“Many of the institutions of society which are indispensable conditions for the successful pursuit of our conscious aims are in fact the result of customs, habits or practices which have been neither invented nor are observed with any such purpose in view. We live in a society in which we can successfully orientate ourselves, and in which our actions have a good chance of achieving their aims, not only because our fellows are governed by known aims or known connections between means and ends, but because they are also confined by rules whose purpose or origin we often do not know and of whose very existence we are often not aware.
Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in the society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations.”
Hayek’s use of the language of evolution to describe the formation and change of social order has always been appealing to me, but it’s not original to him. Evolution was a theme to Hayek’s chief influencers, Smith, Hume, Ferguson, and the rest of the Scottish Enlightenment. Charles Darwin himself even took the ideas of evolution in the social sphere and applied it to the natural world.
