Collective action, institutional design and evolutionary “blindness”

It is the claimed blindness of Darwinian evolution that may appear difficult to ascribe to social processes that are driven by human intentions and purposes, in particular to cases of deliberately coordinated collective action. Accordingly, the general issue that is at stake concerns the relation or interaction between human intentionality and purposefulness on the one hand and evolutionary blind forces on the other. The answer to this question that I will sketch out below has already been hinted at by a phrase from Adam Fergusons An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) that Hayek (1973: 150) is fond of quoting as a paradigmatic statement of the Scottish Enlightenments pre-Darwinian evolutionary social theory: Nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]