The cover of Laplace's Celestial Mechanics symbolic of 'Spontaneous Disorder'

A subversion of Hayek’s notion of ‘spontaneous order’ that emphasises  the emergent negative externalities generated by capitalist civilisation

A ‘spontaneous order’ is a self-organising structure that emerges from evolutionary processes, local cooperation and collective action. In relation to a broader taxonomy of complex structures, ‘spontaneous orders’ that are ‘the result of human action, but not human design’ are a ‘third category’ beyond ‘natural orders’ – that are the result of non-human action and non-conscious design (‘the blind watchmaker’ of natural selection) – and ‘artificial orders’ that are the result of both human action and human design.  

Within classical political economy, the ‘market economy’ has famously been theorised as a form of ‘spontaneous order’, most prominently by Adam Smith (‘the father of economics and capitalism’) through his notion of ‘the invisible hand’. Following Smith in this tradition, F.A Hayek used the term ‘the extended order’ to refer to the ‘self-generating’ structure ‘of human cooperation’ that is ‘more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism’. 

According to Kley, a scholar of Hayek’s Social and Political Thought, ‘for... Hayek, the idea of a spontaneous order is ‘liberalism's “central concept”’ and ‘the notion on which all social theory converges’.  In other words, that ‘the whole task of ‘[liberal] social theory’ is ‘to reconstruct the various spontaneous orders existing in the social world’. 

If the concept of ‘spontaneous order’ – capturing capitalism’s self-constructive emergent behaviour (positive externalities) – is the ‘central concept’ of liberal social theory, I propose the conceptual engineering of ‘spontaneous disorder’ –  to account for capitalism’s self-destructive emergent behaviour (negative externalities) – as the central concept of critical social theory. Accordingly, the whole task of critical social theory is to reconstruct the various ‘spontaneous disorders’ existing in the social world: from inter-state warfare, to industrial pollution to international pandemics to the AI arms race.

On Hayek’s liberal conception, the ‘extended order’ of capitalism is what ‘civilisation depends [on], not only for its origin but also for its preservation’. On the critical counter-conception proposed here,  the ‘extended disorder’ of capitalism is also what civilisation depends on for its origin, but also for its  (periodic/formative and terminal/global) destruction (deterritorialisation).