Mohammad Gani wrote:
>I never understood how deliberate action leads to spontaneous order. 
>To act spontaneously is to act instinctively without conscious 
>pursuit of goals. When people deliberately choose to follow traffic 
>rules, there is order, but how is it spontaneous?
>
>Institutions impose rules of conduct, and people may deliberately 
>abide by those rules to avoid collisions. I do not understand why 
>this would be seen as spontaneous order.


The term "spontaneous order" is unfortunate for just this reason.  I 
prefer "undesigned" or "unplanned" order.  The point is that 
individual actors (including households or firms) can all be making 
very conscious, deliberate, planned decisions, but the pattern of 
outcomes that emerges as those decisions interact with each other and 
the rules that structure such interaction is itself the product of no 
one's intention or design.
The "spontaneous" in spontaneous social orders refers not to the 
actions out of which the order emerges, but to the undesigned nature 
of the emergent order itself.

One can get a pattern of outcomes that was not deliberately chosen 
even if each of the elements whose behavior constitute that pattern 
are engaged in deliberate choice.

I think because Polanyi was first a physical scientist and saw the 
notion of spontaneous order in examples from that world, the problem, 
or at least the ambiguity, of using the word "spontaneous" was 
probably not as apparent to him.  For the purposes of social 
analysis, it would be clearer if we had a different term.

Steve Horwitz