Re: Barkley's post about Hayek's trip duplicating Mill's : Well, it wasn't   
strictly a honeymoon (someone else at the dinner table called it that -   
Hayek's second wife _did_ accompany him, but it was a few years after   
their marriage), and it was Italy and Greece, not Greece and Turkey.   
Barkley, quit speaking for me!!   
  
I also want to say that I did not mean to offend anyone with the   
throw-away line of "how much does it really matter" in regards to the   
discussion of the origins of the term "spontaneous order." I wrote this   
because I felt frustrated that so many of the messages regarding   
spontaneous order seemed to misunderstand what the term means, which to me   
is the most important point.   
  
For me, the phrase "the unintended consequence of intentional human   
action" captures the sorts of thing that Hayek meant by spontaneous order.   
In the market order, people just do their jobs, they have what Paul   
Seabright called "tunnel vision" - they don't see what role they play in   
the larger order.  No one person decides to feed Paris; but Paris gets   
fed, and every day too, and people (with the purchasing power, an   
important but separate issue) can get whatever they want to eat.   
  
No one decided to form a language. (Indeed, attempts to consciously create   
languages have not succeeded in supplanting those that have evolved   
naturally.)  They first evolved presumeably as individuals within small   
groups tried to communicate with each other about danger, food sources,   
emotions, and so on. They have continued to evolve since.   
  
Spontaneous does not mean that the phenomena came out of nowhere, like a   
person spontaneously combusting. (This somewhat rare phenomenon happens in   
North Carolina all the time.)  Rather, it highlights that the phenomenon   
was not something that the individuals that created it were setting out to   
create.   
  
It strikes me that construction of a plane according to blueprints is not   
a spontaneous order. The spontaneous order part is rather the facts that a   
manufacturer can buy the materials needed to undertake such a massive   
project, and that many of the people who thereby contributed to its   
eventual construction had no idea that they were doing so - people whose   
jobs involve rolling steel in a mill, or making glass, or various grades   
of rubber, that ended up being used in planes (and also in cars and boats   
and buildings and lots of other things).  
  
Back to origins of the phrase: I will close by saying that though Hayek   
wrote a lot about Mill, nowhere to my knowledge does he write about him   
in the context of spontaneous orders. Though Mill may have used the   
phrase, I doubt whether Hayek consciously borrowed from him. Also, Hayek   
didn't really start investigating Mill until the early 1940s, when he was   
working on Saint-Simon for the Counter-revolution of Science essay.  It   
strikes me that Greg Ransom's point that Hayek was using the idea, though   
not the phrase, in 1933 is relevant, as is Jack Bladel's point that Roepke   
used it in the late 1930s.   
  
Well, enough from me.   
  
Bruce Caldwell