Hayek Reads the Literatureon the Emergence of Norms

Hayek’s approach to cultural and institutional evolution has been frequently criticizedbecause it is explicitly based on the controversial notion of (cultural) group selection. In this paperthis criticism is rejected on the basis of recent works on biological and cultural evolution. Thepaper’s main contention is that Hayek employed group selection as a tool for the explanation ofselection among several equilibria, and not as a vehicle for the emergence of out of equilibriumbehavior (i.e. altruism). The paper shows that Hayek’s ideas foreshadowed some of the mostpromising developments in the current literature on the emergence of norms...