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* Daniel Luban, Junior Research Fellow in Politics, University College, Oxford, [email protected].
I thank audiences at Yale, the University of Virginia, and the APSA annual meeting in Washington for the chance to present early versions of some of this material, and I especially thank discussants Alex Bleiberg, Stefan Eich, Andrew Sabl, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins for their helpful comments. For further discussion of these themes and other help along the way, I am grateful to Gary Herrigel, Ben Jackson, Karuna Mantena, John McCormick, Sankar Muthu, Jennifer Pitts, Sophie Smith, and Kenta Tsuda. Finally, I thank Leigh Jenco and the APSR editorial team along with four anonymous reviewers for their guidance.
SPONTANEITY
“Why did he without need bring in this strange word, spontaneous?” So lamented Thomas Hobbes (1841, 91), in the midst of his debate with Bishop Bramhall on free will. The term, originating in scholastic philosophy, was in Hobbes’s eyes too ambiguous to be useful; it was never quite clear which forms of action it was meant to label, allowing Bramhall to “give it any signification he please” without regard for consistency. More than that, Hobbes was irked by his opponent weighing down their debate with a piece of Latin jargon—“for English,” he grumbled, “it is not” (1841, 350–1). On that last point, at least, Hobbes would end up being wrong, although not for reasons he could have anticipated: today, the OED lists his 1656 text as its first recorded instance of “spontaneous” in English. Aiming to keep the word out of the language, he had unwittingly helped usher it in.
The irony suits the theme. As “spontaneous order” has become a key concept in modern social theory, it is precisely the gap between intentions and consequences that has served as its central motif. Theorists of spontaneous order emphasize that human society rests on practices and institutions that are the unintended consequences of myriad individual actions. They argue that social order is—or can be, or should be—“grown” rather than “made,” the result of gradual evolution rather than conscious planning. Such theories offer grounds for optimism, suggesting that human short-sightedness and self-seeking might constitute a blessing rather than a curse. But they also carry a note of warning: grown order is a fragile thing, liable to be...