Quotes from “From The Sensory Order to the Liberal Order: Hayek’s Non-rationalist Liberalism”

By Steven Horwitz (2000)

• Human actors require constitutional constraints because we are epistemologically unable to generate social order in any other way.#
  Politics
• If the mind can never exhaustively describe and know itself, any one mind or group of minds can surely never direct economic processes that can only be understood in terms of the phenomenal pictures (i.e., expectations) held in the minds of all of the actors in the economy.#
  EconomicsEpistemology
• Changes in the prices of capital goods signal changes in the knowledge that underlies entrepreneurial plans and expectations.#
  EconomicsEpistemologyExpectations
• If indeed we were all the hyper-rational agents that general equilibrium theory assumes we are, then the very need for market institutions would disappear.#
  EconomicsEquilibrium

Ludwig Lachmann, Capital and Its Structure (1956)

• The business man who forms an expectation is doing precisely what a scientist does when he formulates a working hypothesis. Both business expectation and scientific hypothesis serve the same purpose; both reflect an attempt at cognition and orientation in an imperfectly known world, both embody imperfect knowledge to be tested and improved by later experience.#
  EconomicsScienceExpectations