Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 25
false dichotomy that, by considering anything driven by a conscious
plan as artificial and anything with instinctive characteristics
as natural, brings us inevitably to a rationalist constructivism.
This is why Hayek deplores the fact that the early
signs of an evolutionist model to explain society have been
abandoned in favor of a different conception of natural law
understood as rationalist law, a law according to reason. 42
42 The term rationalism indicates an attitude of unshakeable faith
in the creative capacities of human reason in the field of social and
political institutions. This attitude leads to the belief that any institution
and any order are the result of an intended and conscious
plan, in the belief that reason can control and plan everything that
man does. Hayek writes that “human institutions are made by man.
Though in a sense man-made, i.e., entirely the result of human
actions, they may yet not be designed, not be the intended product
of these actions.” Constructivism consists in “the belief that since all
‘institutions’ have been made by man, we must have complete power
to refashion them in any way we desire.” See F.A. Hayek, The
Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason
(Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952). The “spontaneous order”
school of thought maintains that a large part of human institutions
did not necessarily derive from a mind that planned and directed
them, i.e., institutions, law, and customs are the result of human
action but not the result of a human plan; rather, they are the consequences
of spontaneous collaboration among individuals. This is
the great theme found in Bernard de Mandeville, David Hume, Adam
Ferguson, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, right up to the main
exponents of the Austrian School of economics, Menger, Mises, and
Hayek. It was in fact Hayek who, on the basis of a different attitude
to constructivist rationalism, introduced the categories of true and
false individualism into the history of liberal thought. True individualism
highlights the limits and the fallibility of human reason, while
false individualism holds that reason is able to plan everything and
leads to the claim of infallible social engineering. See F.A. Hayek’s
“Individualism: True and False” in Individualism and Economic
Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949). Awareness of the
limits to reason and to all that rationality could intentionally achieve
in the field of political and social institutions, and thus the impossibility
of a totally rational way of acting in the Cartesian sense,
derives from the inevitable limitations of our knowledge. In other
words, it would not be possible to have total knowledge of all the relevant
facts regarding social structure and human activities. As Hayek