ISSN 2291-5079 Vol 9 | Issue 7 + 8 2021 COSMOS + TAXIS Studies in Emergent Order and Organization COVER IMAGE George Gilbert Scott´s Grand Staircase at COSMOS + TAXIS St. Pancras, London. Studies in Emergent Order and Organization Courtesy of Josephine R. Unglaub VOLUME 9 | ISSUE 7 + 8 2021 https://lemanshots.wordpress.com IN THIS ISSUE EDITORIAL BOARDS HONORARY FOUNDING EDITORS EDITORS Outgrowing Methodological Individualism: Joaquin Fuster Leslie Marsh* Emergence, spontaneous orders, and civil society ..........1 University of California, Los Angeles (editor-in-chief) David F. Hardwick*† The University of British Columbia Gus diZerega The University of British Columbia William N. Butos Lawrence Wai-Chung Lai (deputy editor) What is a Legislature’s Purpose? .......................26 University of Hong Kong Trinity College Thomas J. McQuade Frederick Turner Laurent Dobuzinskis* University of Texas at Dallas (deputy editor) Simon Fraser University Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 Using a Novel Threat Giovanni B. Grandi Surface ...............................................41 (deputy editor) Ted G. Lewis and Waleed I. Al Mannai The University of British Columbia Nathan Robert Cockeram (assistant editor) An informal introduction to Michael Oakeshott’s The University of British Columbia vision of a free, civilized and affirmative life. ..............51 Noël O’Sullivan CONSULTING EDITORS Thierry Aimar Ted G. Lewis Sciences Po Paris Technology Assessment Group, Nurit Alfasi Salinas REVIEWS Ben Gurion University of the Negev Joseph Isaac Lifshitz David Emanuel Andersson* The Shalem College Hayek’s Market Republicanism: The Limits of Liberty .....60 National Sun Yat-sen University Alberto Mingardi IULM University in Milan Mikayla Novak Theodore Burczak Denison University and Istituto Bruno Leoni Per Bylund Stefano Moroni Hans Kelsen’s Writings 1920-1921 ......................69 Oklahoma State University Milan Polytechnic Christopher Adair-Toteff Gene Callahan Edmund Neill New York University The New College of the Humanities at Northeastern Chor-Yung Cheung The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized ...............74 University City University of Hong Kong Fernando A. Monteiro C. D’Andrea Mikayla Novak Francesco Di Iorio Australian National University Nankai University Christian Onof Gus diZerega* Imperial College London Taos, NM POSTSCRIPT Mark Pennington Lenore T. Ealy King’s College London Charles Koch Institute Jason Potts* A Weak Case Against Open Borders: A Critique of Joshi ..78 Péter Érdi RMIT University Danny Frederick and Mark Friedman Kalamazoo College Don Ross Peter Gordon University of Cape Town/ University of Southern California Editorial Information ...................................81 Georgia State University/ Lauren K. Hall* University College Cork Rochester Institute of Technology Scott Scheall Marek Hudik* Arizona State University University of Economics Prague Virgil Storr Sanford Ikeda George Mason University Purchase College, Stephen Turner State University of New York University of South Florida Andrew David Irvine Nikolai G. Wenzel The University of British Columbia, Fayetteville State University Okanagan Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo Byron Kaldis University of Arizona The Hellenic Open University Peter G. Klein Baylor University Corey Abel† Denver, CO Paul Lewis King’s College London *Executive committee http://cosmosandtaxis.org COSMOS + TAXIS Outgrowing It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. Methodological — Deng Xiaoping Individualism: Emergence, spontaneous orders, and civil society Abstract: Methodological individualism provides impor- tant insights into spontaneous orders abstracted from their environments, but cannot probe the depth of their impact GUS DIZEREGA upon individuals whose actions generate the system, com- prehend learning across generations, or the mutual impact of different spontaneous orders. Systems theory suffers no such limitations. This paper integrates Paul Lewis’s explo- ration of emergent qualities in complex orders with the au- thor’s exploration of interactions between multiple such or- ders. Such an approach enriches our understanding of social complexity by demonstrating how causality flows in both directions, from individuals to society and from society and back. There is no starting point. Secondly, it provides a foundation for understanding civil society as a higher order adaptive system than are spontaneous orders. A scientific methodology is only as useful as the light it sheds on phenomena that interest us. Methodologies are tools for studying reality, and like any tool, incorporate an ontology, assumptions about the reality they are supposed to investi- gate. Based on these assumptions, scientific methodologies select what matters most in understanding something from the enormous number of phenomena in the world. In doing so, each methodology necessarily simplifies its field of study, arguing doing so enables us to focus on a question without being overwhelmed with extraneous details. Simplifications are unavoidable, and even the most successful simplifica- tions risk leaving out something important, or making mis- leading assumptions when employed to study new phenom- ena. Such is the case with methodological individualism. Methodological individualism has been a successful tool in important fields within the social sciences, espe- cially economics and, in a different way, Weberian sociol- ogy. Conceptually, methodological individualism is simple: all social phenomena, includig the unintended, can ulti- mately be explained by individual action, without remain- der (for example, Vanberg 1986, p. 80; Caldwell 2004, p. 413; Oliverio 2016, p. 38; 2015, p. 38; Rothbard 1962, p. 2). Methodological individualism has enabled economists to trace out the logic of independent decisions shaped by a Outgrowing Methodological Individualism: EMERGENCE, spontaneous ORDERS, AND CIVIL society 1 COSMOS + TAXIS framework of enabling rules to collectively determine prices in the market. Individuals are always the ulti- mate initiators of these phenomena. The purest version of methodological individualism might be “Crusoe economics,” which initially con- siders an isolated man face-to-face with nature. His actions are all means to his ultimate ends, deriving their value from their contribution to achieving them. Many key economic concepts such as time preference and capital are introduced by analyzing Crusoe’s choices (Rothbard 1962, I, chaps.1 and 2.). When “Friday” arrives, this introduction of interpersonal relationships supposedly supplies “the indispensable groundwork for the entire structure of economics” (Rothbard 2007). Fundamental to this conception was “man’s” isolation from the world in which he found himself, and about which he needed to learn in order to get what he wanted from it. Crusoe economics was atomistic, linear, and reductionist, assuming a cultured being with wants, and proceeding from there. More sophisti- cated approaches, such as employed by Mancur Olson (1965), William Niskanen (1971), James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock (1999), presented increasingly complex images of human beings, with less isolation from their context. What is called “behavioral economics” is also largely methodologically individualist. Its insights’ pow- er is rooted in analysis of individual choices that consistently do not meet the expectations predicted by rational choice models (Lewis 2017). While behavioral economics focuses on “anomalies” the neoclassical system could not explain, its approach is devoted primarily to individual fixes, retaining many neoclassical axioms, such as methodological individualism (Snower 2020). Perhaps the most sophisticated form of methodological individualism is called “complex methodologi- cal individualism,” which will be discussed later (Di Iorio 2016). But all argue social theory ultimately must be rooted in individual choice. HAYEK’S BIOLOGICAL TURN During the first decades of his career, F. A. Hayek had argued the social sciences differed from the natural sciences because, unlike within the natural sciences, we had access to human minds, and the implications of their subjectivity for explaining action. Among human beings, knowledge was fragmentary and contex- tual, distributed unevenly within a society, and sometimes in error, yet society was not chaotic. No equiva- lent problem confronted the study of physics. Consequently, different methods were needed to pursue the social sciences as distinct from the natural sciences. This distinction argued methodological individualism was a tool essential for the social sciences, but not needed in the natural sciences (1952). In time, Hayek’s research went beyond traditional economic questions, such as the market vs. central planning debate. Hayek’s effort to understand the social institutions needed to support a market econo- my changed his research focus. Increasingly, he emphasized the cultural and legal environment facilitating markets, rather than focusing on issues within economics more narrowly defined. As Bruce Caldwell puts it, along the way Hayek discovered, “orders in many sorts of unrelated phenomena in both the natural world and in the social relations and institutions that comprise a part of that world, orders that emerge due to rule following on the part of the relevant constituent elements” (Caldwell 2014, p. 2). A sign of the new territory Hayek had entered was his emphasizing the similarities between Darwinian and social evolutionary processes rather than the distinction