Published in 1983, this article presents Hayek’s honorary-doctorate lecture delivered at the University of Giessen on 1 June 1982. Its argument connects customary morality, the extended social order, and humanity’s capacity to feed a vastly enlarged population. Hayek first explains civilization through cultural selection rather than conscious design, then distinguishes cultural from biological evolution, and finally defends population growth against accounts of impoverishment and resource scarcity. He identifies the lecture as an outline of the argument he intends to develop in The Fatal Conceit: its central claim is that institutions sustaining civilization arose before people could understand their benefits.
Wir begreifen die Gesellschaft, in der wir leben, so wenig, weil nicht wir sie geschaffen haben.
English translation: We understand the society in which we live so little because we did not create it.
This opening reverses the usual relationship between reason and institutions. For Hayek, human intelligence did not first devise the extensive division of labor and knowledge; that order supplied the conditions in which intelligence itself could develop. Dissatisfaction with society becomes dangerous when it rests on the assumption that an order exceeding individual comprehension could have been deliberately constructed better. His historical contrast is between small groups pursuing shared, concrete purposes and a large society coordinating strangers through abstract rules. Instincts adapted to the former persist, while civilization requires learned restraints upon them.
Hume, Smith, and Ferguson provide the conceptual bridge between instinct and reason: institutions can result from human action without embodying human design. Hayek rejects a rationalist or utilitarian derivation of morality because early participants could not have anticipated the knowledge and opportunities that an extended society would generate. Rules prevailed, he argues, because groups practicing them expanded and displaced others—not because their members understood their eventual advantages.
Der entscheidende Schritt im Übergang von dem vom Instinkt beherrschten Tier und selbst noch dem primitiven Wilden des Jäger- und Sammler-Stadiums zur Zivilisation war die Entwicklung des Sondereigentums.
English translation: The decisive step in the transition from the animal governed by instinct, and even from the primitive savage of the hunter-gatherer stage, to civilization was the development of private property.
Property is consequently more than an economic arrangement. Together with the family, it belongs to an inherited morality that restrains immediate impulses and makes extensive cooperation possible. Hayek invokes Hume’s principles of stable possession, consensual transfer, and keeping promises to specify this institutional foundation. Socialism’s appeal, in his account, partly arises from its opposition to restrictions whose usefulness is neither instinctively attractive nor transparently demonstrable.
The lecture carefully differentiates cultural evolution from biological evolution. Culture transmits acquired practices; individuals inherit from numerous intellectual predecessors, not merely their parents; selection operates primarily between groups; and transmitted behaviors generate institutions such as language, law, custom, and money. Hayek therefore rejects “social Darwinism” as a misleading description. Nevertheless, he assigns both processes a common selection criterion: reproductive advantage. Neither supplies historical laws capable of predicting future development, since adaptation encounters unforeseen circumstances. This combination makes demographic success explanatory without making history a predetermined sequence.
The economic counterpart is the use of dispersed knowledge. Private property decentralizes decision-making so that people can act upon particular circumstances of place and time. Prices indicate the relative importance of opportunities and encourage the acquisition of useful information. Centralization cannot reproduce this coordination simply by gathering knowledge into one authority.
Unsere Fähigkeit, vier Milliarden Menschen am Leben zu erhalten, ist dem Umstand zu verdanken, daß die meisten von uns mit ihren Bemühungen Menschen dienen, die sie nicht kennen, ja von deren Existenz sie nicht einmal wissen, und daß sie ihrerseits durch die Leistungen von anderen Menschen erhalten werden, von denen diese auch nichts wissen und denen sie ebenso unbekannt sind.
English translation: Our ability to keep four billion people alive is due to the fact that most of us, through our efforts, serve people whom we do not know, indeed of whose existence we are not even aware, and that we in turn are sustained by the contributions of other people who likewise know nothing of us and to whom we are equally unknown.
Nourishment thus gives spontaneous order its concrete stakes: survival depends on reciprocal services extending beyond personal acquaintance or shared intentions. Population growth can enlarge markets and deepen specialization, creating a cumulative interaction between numbers, knowledge, and productivity.
Hayek also credits religious traditions with preserving property and family through beliefs whose truth cannot be demonstrated. His defense concerns their institutional effects rather than proof of their supernatural claims. He warns that scientific rationalism can destroy indispensable restraints by demanding explicit justification for everything inherited. This remains a strong inference within the lecture: evolutionary persistence and expansion are made grounds for caution toward reform, while the detailed justification is deferred to the projected book.
The final section addresses the feared connection between population growth and poverty. Hayek distinguishes declining average income, caused by a changing population composition, from declining incomes within particular groups. He reinterprets capitalism’s creation of the proletariat as enabling additional people to survive, and rejects a fixed-resource Malthusian model for an industrial economy in which specialization and capital can expand. Acknowledging that ecology and development are outside his specialty, he relies on Julian Simon, Thomas Sowell, and Peter Bauer. His closing appeal to price signals extends the lecture’s central epistemic claim: decentralized markets, he maintains, register information unavailable to any individual analyst. The work’s significance lies in this tightly joined—and explicitly polemical—account of moral inheritance, dispersed knowledge, and demographic survival.
This work was divided into 4 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 4 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian