I wonder if participants in this discussion are aware that Hayek (a serious Mill scholar), got his phrase, 'spontaneous order', from a passage in one of Mill's three posthumous essays on religion, in which Mill writes -- rather disparagingly -- of 'the spontaneous order of Nature'? Mill used the term to label what we might now call 'the balance of nature': the ecological (i.e. population-dynamic) general equilibrium of many coexisting species in defined space. He seemed to think that Man could improve on it; and seemed also to think that we could improve on the 'spontaneous order' of human societies that undoubtedly arise from the unintended consequences of many private, self-regarding human acts. [But Mill may not have been right. Or he may simply have been biassed. See Linda Raeder's recent book (2002) on Mill's 'constructivism'.] Anthony Waterman