# The Problem of Living in Two Worlds **URL:** **By** Chandran Kukathas **Published:** January 1, 1989 --- “In a small society we can plan for the achievement of collective goals. In the extended order we must rely on abstract rules.” Of the many interesting ideas to be found in Hayek’s latest work, one strikes me as particularly worthy of comment. Indeed, it is an idea that is central to Hayek’s argument. The idea is that a part of the difficulty we face in modern society is that we must “constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules.” (p. 18) We must live in two sorts of world at once. There is the micro-cosmos: the world of the family, or small community. And there is the macro-cosmos: the world of the extended order that is our civilization. The difficulty stems from the fact that our instincts fit us for life in the small society, which relies on our capacity for altruism, voluntary collaboration, and our longing for solidarity with our fellows. However, the rules that are thus appropriate in the micro-cosmos cannot serve to regulate an extended order. Yet our strongest inclination is to apply to the wider society the rules that serve the small community. The danger in this is plain. To try to govern an extended order by rules appropriate to a community cannot succeed because we lack the knowledge. In the small community most actions aim at some determinate good. In the extended order, we cannot know the impact of our actions since what we do affects many who are distant and unknown to us. Attempts to overcome this difficulty have been attempts to marshall knowledge, and plan accordingly for particular social ends. Throughout his writings Hayek has emphasized two unhappy consequences of this. First, such attempts not only fail, but destroy the coordinating qualities of spontaneous orders: the consequence of social planning is disorder. Second, planners faced with such chaos are led more and more to interfere with individual liberty in the attempt to eliminate the sources of discoordination. > In a small society we can plan for the achievement of collective goals. And we can monitor individual conduct. In the extended order we must rely on abstract rules. Hayek’s latest work offers us an insight into how difficult is such a demand. Man is asked to inhabit the realm of society governed by abstract principles, when he is by inclination a member of concrete communities who would rather be governed by his instincts. Interestingly, liberalism has long been accused of making the unwarranted assumption that man is an independent, asocial being. How else, ask liberalism’s critics, can liberal theory conclude that men should adopt abstract principles of conduct? Hayek, however, here refuses to assume that man is anything but a creature motivated by the instincts that make for social solidarity. The problem is that such instincts can have no place in the extended order of the modern world. > In a small society we can plan for the achievement of collective goals. And we can monitor individual conduct. In the extended order we must rely on abstract rules. We can see some recognition of this tension between our natural inclinations and the demands of the extended order in the work of Rousseau. Yet in his work we find no adequate solutions. While he came to recognize that there was no prospect of returning to the life of the pre-modern world—returning to the forests “to live with the bears”—he had only confused and inconsistent recommendations to make about how modern society might be governed. What we see in Hayek’s work, by contrast, is a clear assurance that the extended order of the modern world, in which we are governed by abstract rules, must be welcomed. We must do so not because we are abstract, asocial, independent individuals but despite the fact that we are not.