Law, Legislation and Liberty (German: Recht, Gesetzgebung und Freiheit) is a work of political philosophy and social theory by the Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek, written between 1963 to 1978, published in three volumes between 1973 and 1979, and subsequently collected into a single volume with a revised preface in 1982. The three volumes are subtitled Rules and Order (1973), The Mirage of Social Justice (1976), and The Political Order of a Free People (1979). The work is widely regarded as the culmination of Hayek's philosophical career, extending and deepening the arguments of The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Its animating concern is fundamentally epistemological: Hayek argues that human reason is structurally incapable of comprehending, let alone deliberately directing, the complex social orders that emerge from centuries of human interaction. This argument draws heavily on the Scottish Enlightenment tradition, particularly the insights of David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith, and Ferguson's celebrated observation that social institutions are often "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design." Central to the work is the distinction between two kinds of social order: cosmos, or spontaneous order, which emerges from the voluntary actions of individuals following rules they may not consciously articulate; and taxis, a deliberately designed or constructed order. Hayek argues that the erosion of this distinction, and the rise of legal positivism, interest group politics, and the pursuit of social justice, threatens the foundations of a free society. The work also contains Hayek's sustained critique of social justice as a concept incompatible with the operation of a market economy, since the outcomes generated by freely-chosen interactions between individuals, he argues, cannot be just or unjust, as well as his constitutional proposals for a bicameral legislature designed to separate law-making from day-to-day governmental administration. Contemporary reception was largely admiring among liberal and classical liberal thinkers. Karl Popper described the work as reopening the most fundamental debate in political philosophy, while Philosophical Studies judged it an immense contribution to social and legal philosophy. The Times Higher Education Supplement called it a careful and brilliant statement of the conditions of human freedom. Critical responses focused chiefly on the third volume, which Robert F. Drinan in the University of Chicago Law Review described as opaque and occasionally contradictory, and on the tension, identified by the political philosopher Chandran Kukathas, between Hayek's scepticism about human reason and his attempt to construct a systematic defence of liberal principles. Law, Legislation and Liberty has had an important influence on politics. Its arguments had a significant impact on the policies of Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s as well as Ronald Reagan's. More broadly, it has shaped debate in jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and the philosophy of social science, and remains a central text in scholarly discussions of the rule of law, spontaneous order, and the limits of democratic government.
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