# Evolutionary Functionalism **URL:** **By** John Gray **Published:** January 1, 1989 --- “In addition to this seminal insight of Hayek’s, the book develops two themes that have come increasingly to preoccupy him in recent years.” In this, the first volume of his collected words, the central elements of Hayek’s system of ideas are freshly summarized and restated. More clearly and insistently than ever before, Hayek demonstrates that socialism is above all an _intellectual error_ in that it presupposes an epistemological impossibility—the centralization of dispersed social knowledge in the planning authorities. This new volume of Hayek’s is invaluable in that it illuminates the function of markets as devices for economizing on the most radical and invaluable of scarcities—that of human knowledge. In addition to this seminal insight of Hayek’s, the book develops two themes that have come increasingly to preoccupy him in recent years. The first is the importance of traditional morality as a condition of a stable market order and the threat to it posed by modern rationalism. This is a concern Hayek has in common with many of the Scottish thinkers and with today’s neoconservative theorists, but it consorts badly with his admiration for Mandeville and with his observation that much traditional morality (such as that theorized by Aristotle) is anti-market. The second theme is cultural evolution, in which Hayek argues for a sort of natural selection of traditions (including religious traditions) whereby the “fittest” are selected out and prevail, with the test of fitness being the carrying capacity of a tradition as measured by the number of people it can support. Hayek is surely right to point out that it was capitalism that created the proletariat inasmuch as without capitalist productivity the huge increase in proletarian numbers could not have occurred. For myself, however, I remain wholly unconvinced by the version of evolutionary functionalism that this argument invokes. It detects in human history a persistent mechanism where I can see only singularities and contingencies and has many unfortunate echoes of Spencer. With reference to the selection of religions, for example, it has typically been the capture of state power rather than any Darwinian procreative advantage that has accounted for the triumph and longevity of the dominant faiths. Again, the vast populations of communist states are able to subsist, perhaps indefinitely, as parasites on the world’s surviving market economies. None of this (with its anti-Malthusian implication that there cannot be overpopulation) is at all persuasive. In this part of his argument, Hayek has followed Spencer in seeking to ground the institution of the market in a larger synthetic philosophy that has some of the characteristics of the scientism he has elsewhere brilliantly criticized. Notwithstanding these critical reservations, this volume is to be welcomed for its freshness and vigor and is significant in inaugurating a most notable collection of Hayek’s works.