Features September 2013
The self-interested society
Societies are all imperfect, but self-interested societies fare far better than any of their counterparts.
Editors’ note: Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013), a valued friend and contributor to The New Criterion, delivered a version of the following remarks to the Mont Pelerin Society in the Galapagos Islands in June. He died suddenly on his return trip.
Here in the Galapagos, the abstraction that must haunt our imaginings is evolution. But the term has two distinct meanings. Here is one genealogy, from Hayek:
[M]odern biology has borrowed the concept of evolution from studies of culture of older lineage. If this is in a sense well known, it is almost always forgotten.
Of course the theory of cultural evolution [sometimes also described as psycho-social, super-organic, or...
Of course the theory of cultural evolution [sometimes also described as psycho-social, super-organic, or...
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