EMERGENCE OF THE COMPETITIVE MARKET AND EVOLUTIONISM IN HAYEK WORK

The most characteristical feature of the hayekian epistemology consists in its full adhesion to the evolutionary point of view as opposed to the dogmatism of the constructivist rationalism. According to Hayek, only an evolutionary methodology allows the analysis of the genesis of spontaneous orders as competitive market. The competitive market order appears when people learn to obey to general, end-independent abstract rules conduct. Such a learning supposes, fundamentally, the individual liberty which is individual's ability to determine autonomously his aims. Hayek's own considerations reveal however that individual liberty, in the modem sense, represents a recent invention the analysis of which resists to an evolutionary approach. A certain constructivist approach is expressly required to take into account the discontinuity that modem liberty introduces in the history.