Ontology and the history of economic thought: the case of anti-reductionism in the work of Friedrich Hayek

Tony Lawson has long advocated an ‘ontological turn’ in the history of economic thought. This essay aims to contribute towards that goal by considering how one aspect of the methodology adopted by a prominent heterodox economist was informed by ontological considerations. The economist is Friedrich Hayek, the aspect of his methodology concerns the possibility of reductionism, while the ontological category that informs his anti-reductionist methodology—though not, as we shall see, in a wholly consistent way—is that of ‘emergence’. The account presented below suggests that the notion of emergence played an increasingly important, and also increasingly explicit, role in the arguments Hayek mounts against reductionism in his postwar work on theoretical psychology and social theory. In the case of his theoretical psychology, notwithstanding the fact that he had access to a set of concepts that afforded him the opportunity to mount an emergentist case against reductionism, Hayek’s most prominent argument against reductionism was, and remained, computational—rather than emergentist—in nature. In the case of his mature, post-1960 social theory, however, Hayek explicitly advanced a consistently ‘emergentist’ case against reductionism, based on the importance of organising relations for the generation of higher-level structural properties such as the coordinative powers of the liberal market economy. The implications of this ontologically informed discussion of Hayek’s arguments against reductionism for existing interpretations of Hayek’s work are considered.