I must confess I did not follow all the postings on this topic, so in case this is a double, forget it. [All of the messages on the HES list are archived and available at http://eh.net/pipermail/hes/ HB] As far as I read the postings, I did not see any reference to Max Weber's Roscher und Knies und die logischen Probleme der historischen Nationaloekonomie of 1902. This is, for several reasons, a good candidate for the origin of the meaning of the term spontaneous order (as explained by Bruce Caldwell). In the English translation of 1975 we read that the Historical School overlooked the "fundamental and substantive problem of economics" that was posed "before and after Roscher." That was to find an answer to Mandeville's fundamental question: "How are the origins and persistence of the institutions of economic life to be explained, institutions which were not (cursivated in original) purposefully created by collective means, but which nevertheless - from our point of view - function pursposefully?" (Weber, 1975, 80). Weber continues that this was the problem posed by Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees, and "many of his successors, consciously or unconsciously agreed with [his] view: economic self-interest is that power which ... 'always wills evil but does good'" (Weber, 1975, 83). We can find Weber's assessment of Mandeville almost literally in Hayek's essay on Mandeville (to my knowledge without the reference) which is all about spontaneous order. Harro Maas