Order Nobody Designed – Libertarianous

Martin Elson

Much of the order we encounter was never designed. No one drew up the English language, the price of bread, the path worn across a park, or the manners that let strangers share a sidewalk. That observation, made at least since Hume and Smith and named spontaneous order by Michael Polanyi in 1948, is the first half of the case for anarchy. The second half is harder and matters more: an order nobody designed can still be one the people living in it would never have agreed to. So “was it planned?” is the wrong question to ask of an order. The right ones are whether the people in it agreed to it, and whether they can leave. And for those who would rather stay: can they work to change the order, without forcing the change on those who like it as it is?

A tradition, and a warning inside it

Norman Barry traced the idea back through the Scottish Enlightenment. David Hume argued that reason alone can’t work out in advance the rules a society needs; experience and custom carry that knowledge, built up by trial and error. Adam Smith described people led to promote ends that were no part of their intention. Carl Menger explained money as a medium nobody invented, grown out of barter; David Graeber argues the barter never happened and that money began as credit, often kept by temples and palaces. F. A. Hayek gathered the tradition and named its rival: “constructivist rationalism,” the belief that a good society has to be designed from the top. His examples are familiar. Language, money, the common law, and prices that carry more knowledge than any planner could collect.

Barry also left a warning in the same essay. The seventeenth-century jurist Matthew Hale defended the common law as the accumulated wisdom of ages, and Barry notes where that leads when pushed: accepting an institution merely because it has survived. Logicians call that the appeal to tradition. Survival shows that something works for someone. It doesn’t show that it works for everyone, or that anyone agreed to it. Cruel customs nobody planned can last for centuries: footbinding ran for roughly a thousand years in China. Someone devised the method and every binding was deliberate, but no decree spread the custom. Status and the marriage market did: families bound their daughters because a bride with unbound feet might not marry well. Qing emperors banned it and failed. What ended it, within a generation, was families pledging together not to bind their daughters and to marry their sons to women who were unbound, as Gerry Mackie has shown. The custom was a belief everyone acted on and no one had planned; it fell when people coordinated their way out.

The word they gave us

Peter Kropotkin opens “On Order” by admitting the name was a gift from enemies. Opponents pinned “anarchy” on the anti-authoritarians of the First International because it suggested chaos, and the anarchists decided to keep it. Then he turns the charge around and asks which order they are accused of destroying. The order praised in his day meant most people laboring so that a few could live in comfort, and famine in the countryside while grain was shipped abroad. Calling that order, and its opposite chaos, is the equivocation Order Without a Master Plan starts from.

Kropotkin was surer than this site is about what comes after. He expected a harmony to emerge once classes were gone. Start Here makes no promise of a final state, only a direction, and a method for finding out when it is wrong.

Three kinds of spontaneous

Charles Johnson pulls the word apart. An order can be spontaneous in three separate ways. It can be emergent: no one planned the overall pattern. It can be polycentric: no one directs the parts. And it can be consensual: no one is forced to take part. The textbook cases, like prices adjusting to scarcity or a language changing with use, have all three, so libertarians praise “spontaneous order” as if the three came as a set. They don’t. Wikipedia is consensual and polycentric, but hardly emergent, since its editors are trying to build an encyclopedia.

The case that matters runs the other way: emergent and polycentric, but not consensual. Johnson’s example is Susan Brownmiller’s account of rape culture in Against Our Will. No council plans it, and the men who commit the acts often act alone. Yet the scattered acts add up to an order that teaches women where they may walk and when. If dispersed knowledge can add up to a good order, dispersed prejudice and violence can add up to a bad one. A lynch mob, or a march that turns into a riot, is the same thing at small scale and high speed: no one is in charge, and everyone is swept along.

So spontaneity earns an order no credit by itself. Consent does, and consent that can be checked: can people say no, and can they leave? Those are the two lines in Start Here. Markets raise the same question. Prices emerge, but they emerge on top of property rules someone enforces; Architecture, Not Weather takes that up.

Design without a designer

Starlings, bees and ants coordinate without a conductor; Radiolab’s hour on emergence is a good way in. People do something swarms don’t. They make their own rules. Elinor Ostrom studied commons that lasted for centuries, from Swiss alpine meadows to Spanish irrigation systems, and found the same features again and again in Governing the Commons:

Clear boundaries: who may use the resource is known.
Rules fitted to local conditions.
The users take part in making the rules.
Monitors who are users, or answer to them.
Sanctions that start small and rise with repeat offenses.
Conflict resolution that is cheap and close at hand.
Outside authorities recognize the users’ right to organize.
For larger systems, small units nested inside larger ones.

These are designed rules, made by the people who live under them. Ostrom’s commons sit between Hayek’s two kinds of order, neither blind emergence nor command from above. What was missing was never design; it was a master plan. The seventh principle names the threat: a commons lasts only as long as a higher authority doesn’t override it. The Economics section takes up Ostrom’s wider legacy.

William Gillis puts the contrast in the state’s own terms. The state sells itself as the solution to coordination problems. But its monopoly on force is a shortcut past negotiation, and once the shortcut exists, everyone is drawn to capture it rather than reach agreement. The state claims to solve a coordination problem and creates a coercion problem instead.

Already here

John Hasnas makes the case the simple way: the best proof that something is possible is that it exists. Anarchy, he says, means a society without government, not without governance. Cindy Milstein draws the same line from the social-anarchist side: anarchism is self-governance, people running their own affairs directly, not the absence of structure. Most of the rules people live by, in contract, property and tort, grew out of settling real disputes. Much protection is private already. He recalls a law professor explaining why police must be a state monopoly, while one of Temple University’s private guards walked past escorting a student through a neighborhood the city police barely served. Once you believe government is what makes order, you see its hand wherever law, police and courts appear, and stop seeing everything else. The law side of this is in Law Without a Monopoly.

Hasnas sets the bar low on purpose. He doesn’t argue for a society without coercion, or for any principle of justice. He argues only that people can live together without a central coercive authority. This site asks more of an order than that, but his bar is the right one to clear first.

The smaller evidence is everywhere: the gift, the favor, the volunteer shift, the neighbors who sort out a fence without a lawyer. Norman Yoffee’s rule of thumb fits: if you can argue about whether a society is a state, it isn’t. David Graebernoticed how the argument with skeptics is rigged. Name a stateless society and it’s too primitive; name a modern experiment and it’s too small; name a revolution and it was crushed. The skeptic is really asking for a modern state with the government plucked out, which no state has ever allowed. Graeber’s answer is that anarchist organization wouldn’t look like a state at all. Anything not imposed from above counts, “from a klezmer band to the international postal service.”

Organization was never the question

In 1969 Murray Bookchin wrote to the New Left to bury a myth: that anarchists reject organization. The question, he said, was never organization against none, but what kind. Anarchist groups grow from below instead of being engineered from above. Their members act together from conviction, not as a docile membership steered by a few leaders. He had the French revolt of 1968 to point to, where the disciplined, centralized parties of the left worked to steer the uprising back into parliament. Bookchin later left the anarchist label for his own communalism, but the 1969 distinction holds.

The strongest case against

Spontaneous order has mostly been a conservative argument. Edmund Burke defended inherited institutions because no one could redesign them better. Hayek, who refused the conservative label, still held that evolved rules deserve obedience even when we can’t say why they work. On that reading the idea anarchists borrow is aimed at them. The state, property titles, the family as it stands: all grew, and the argument tells reformers to keep their hands off. Order Without a Master Plan adds the sharpest version. The state itself grew, one bandit settling down and calling his take a tax.

The argument proves too much for the people who use it. If having evolved confers authority, it confers it on everything that evolved, including the commons, cooperatives and mutual aid societies that states have broken up again and again. Evolved orders are many, and they compete; the state is the one that closed the competition. Nor does an order’s history settle whether the people in it agreed. That is the test history can’t pass for anyone. And Hayek’s own reason to distrust designers, that no one can gather the knowledge a society runs on, applies with most force to the biggest designer of all.

Where this lands

Order without rulers isn’t a hope; much of life already runs on it. But “spontaneous” is a description, not a verdict. Some undesigned orders are good and some are cruel, and the difference isn’t in how they arose. It’s in whether the people inside agreed, can still say no, and can walk away. Where they can’t, an order nobody designed is no better than one somebody did. Exit gets its own page, The Door That Stays Open.

Sources

Norman P. Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order” (Literature of Liberty 5, no. 2, 1982). Hume, Smith, Menger, Hayek; the warning about Hale’s traditionalism. original · copy here
F. A. Hayek, “Kinds of Order in Society” (1964) and Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1973). Spontaneous vs. made order; constructivist rationalism.
Peter Kropotkin, “On Order,” in Words of a Rebel (Paroles d’un révolté, 1885). Whose order? copy here
Charles W. Johnson, “Spontaneous Order and Libertarian Social Theory” (C4SS). Emergent, polycentric, consensual; malign orders. original · copy here
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Simon & Schuster, 1975). Johnson’s case of an unplanned, nonconsensual order.
Gerry Mackie, “Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account” (American Sociological Review61, no. 6, 1996). A custom no one planned, ended by coordinated pledges after state bans failed.
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990). The design principles. book
Radiolab, “Emergence” (WNYC). Swarms without a conductor. archived
William Gillis, “Your Freedom Is My Freedom: The Premise of Anarchism” (Human Iterations, 2017). The state as a shortcut past negotiation. original
John Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” in Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? (Ashgate, 2008). Governance without government; look around. original · copy here
Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press / Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2010). Anarchism as self-governance, from the social-anarchist side.
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004). The loaded dice; organization that isn’t a state. PDF
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011). Against the barter story; money as credit, often kept by temples and palaces.
Murray Bookchin, “Anarchy and Organization: A Letter to the Left” (New Left Notes, January 15, 1969). What kind of organization. copy here
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and F. A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (1960). The conservative reading.