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The Presumption of Reason
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10060 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
3,963 Words |
| Author
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F.A. Hayek
F.A. Hayek is professor of Economics at the University of
Freiburg, Germany. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Economics in 1974. |
The relationship between the theory of evolution and the development of culture raises a number of highly interesting questions, to many of which economics as a science provides philosophical access that few other disciplines offer.
There has however been great confusion about the matter. So-called social Darwinism, in particular, proceeded from the assumption that any investigator into the evolution of human culture has to go to school with Darwin. This is however quite mistaken. The idea of evolution stems from the theory of language and from the theory of law, not to mention economics, and long antedated Darwinism. Indeed, not only is the idea of evolution much older in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, but I would even be prepared to argue that Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from the social sciences. As we learn from his notebooks, Darwin was reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations at just that time, in 1838, when he was formulating his own theory. In any case, Darwin's work was preceded by decades, indeed by a century of research concerning the rise of highly complex spontaneous orders (such as the market order, and other institutions and traditions) through a process of evolution. Even words like "genetic" and "genetics," which have today, long after Darwin, become technical expressions of biology, were by no means invented by biologists. The first person I know to have spoken of genetic development was the German philosopher and cultural historian Herder. We find the idea again in Wieland, and again in Humboldt. Thus modern biology has borrowed the concept of evolution from studies of culture of older lineage. If this is in a sense well known, it is also almost always forgotten.
Of course the theory of cultural evolution and the theory of biological evolution are hardly identical. Indeed, they make some very different assumptions. Just to mention one of great importance: although biological theory now excludes the inheritance of acquired characteristics, all cultural development of course rests on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And there are of course many other differences which I cannot pursue here.
Now although I wish the theory of evolution to be seen in its broad historical setting, and the contribution of the social sciences to it to be recognized, I do not at all wish to dispute that the working out of a theory of evolution, in all of its ramifications, is one of the great intellectual achievements of modern times, one which gives us a completely new view of the highly complex world in which we have to live, or that, thanks to it, we now understand many new
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