Law, Legislation and Liberty is a work in three volumes by Nobel laureate economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. In it, Hayek further develops the philosophical principles he discussed earlier in The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, and other writings. Law, Legislation and Liberty is more abstract than Hayek's earlier work, and it focuses on the conflicting views of society as either a design, a made order ("taxis"), on the one hand, or an emergent system, a grown order ("cosmos"), on the other. These ideas are then connected to two different forms of law: law proper, or "nomos" coinciding more or less with the traditional concept of natural law, which is an emergent property of social interaction, and legislation, or "thesis", which is properly confined to the administration of non-coercive government services, but is easily confused with the occasional acts of legislature that do actually straighten out flaws in the nomos.
Contents
Vol. 1 : Rules and Order (1973)
Reason and Evolution
Cosmos and Taxis
Principles and Expediency
The Changing Concept of Law
Nomos: The Law of Liberty
Thesis: The Law of Legislation
Vol. 2 : The Mirage of Social Justice (1976)
General Welfare and Particular Purposes
The Quest for Justice
'Social' or Distributive Justice
The Market Order or Catallaxy
The Discipline of Abstract Rules and the Emotions of the Tribal Society
Vol. 3 : The Political Order of a Free People (1979)
Majority Opinion and Contemporary Democracy
The Division of Democratic Powers
The Public Sector and the Private Sector
Government Policy and the Market
The Miscarriage of the Democratic Ideal: A Recapitulation
A Model Constitution
The Containment of Power and the Dethronement of Politics
Epilogue: The Three Sources of Human Values