Abstract
Autore:
Cubeddu Raimondo
Titolo:
"Informazione, conoscenza e politica in Hayek"
This paper should clarify the relationship between ‘individual order’ and ‘extended order’, paying particular attention to Hayek’s theory of knowledge in The Sensory Order.
The paper will touch the following points: 1. the affinity between that thesis and the "value-attribution" process in the economic field as already formulated from Menger and Böhm-Bawerk; 2. how this theory of knowledge becomes the basis of Hayek’s methodology, as showed in the essays of the Thirties and Fourties; 3. the possibility of finding this theory in Hayek’s critique both to the principles of the theory of economic equilibrium and to the collectivist economic pianning; 4. how this same theory, as a general theory of human action, becomes the fundamental of Hayek’s political philosophy.
Hayek’s scientific program will be intended as a theory of "order" stressing upon the manner through which a "social order" could result from a plurality of different "individual orders". In this case, the starting point is the admission of the scarcity and fallibility of individual knowledge, and of its social dispersion. Moreover, in the "value-attribution" process, and hence in the cognitive one, n important role is played by the fact that the individual action is leaded by "subjective time expectations", that is by the time the individual thinks to have at his disposal to satisfy his subjective perceived needs.
Therefore, the "market process" and the "catallactics" can be considered the forms through which individuals exchange (more or less true) informations concerning the chance of realizing the subjective expectations. Hence social institutions become attempts to "produce certainty", that is to make trustworthy forecasts about the realizability of individual and social expectations.
The paper will develop as follows: 1. How, according to Hayek, the social order is the more or less intentional result of the exchange of individual orders; and then, how this kind of production is complicated by the fact that individuals have different and sometimes opposite "subjective expectations"; 2. How Hayek´s philosophy of social sciences is founded on a theory of knowledge and human action inextricably connected to the diverse manners in which "different" individual minds try to establish an order between the sensory perceptions, putting them into environmental, cultural, genetic, and standing developing "models"; 3. How Hayek´s political philosophy, that is his theory of the "best political order", is based upon a theory of "liberty as right to diversity".
