Eighteenth-Century Evolutionary Thought and its Relevance in the Age of Legislation

This essay revisits the evolutionist writingsof the eighteenth century to clarify their key ideas concerninglegal and social evolution and to assess their relevance in thepresent era of pervasive legislation. The discovery of the principleof the accumulation of design is traced to these writings andthe continuity of twentieth century spontaneous-order theoryand new institutional economics with this tradition is noted.While highlighting the contributions of other institutional theoriststo the elucidation of the role of purposive action in legal evolution,the author argues that input designing does not alter the fundamentalnature of legal emergence as postulated by the eighteenth centuryscholars. The essay supports the ideal of legal generality, freespeech, property and contractual freedom as normative implicationsof the evolutionary viewpoint.