Abstract

The concept of evolution has a central place in Friedrich A. von Hayek’s thought. He reverses its genesis by making it an idea first and foremost proper to the social sciences. This allows him to theorize spontaneous order as the result of a cultural evolutionary process that postulates a tertium genus between nature and artifice: social institutions as the result of human action, but not of its design. This paper aims to reconstruct the Hayekian conception of evolution, from its epistemological premises to questions about its possible teleology.