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