Abstract

Individuals act more or less simultaneously as economic agents, citizens, and participants in civil society. Their interactions and their ways of fulfilling these roles take many forms. Not all of them can be said to be self-organizing, yet in several instances patterns of organization emerge spontaneously without being deliberately designed. Of course, the market economy—or “catallaxy,” as F. A. Hayek called it—remains the best example of such “spontaneous orders.” But there are others. Gus diZerega, for example, has identified science and democracy as being similarly constituted by self-referential, self-organizing processes. In this paper I focus on what I call the philanthropic order. By this I intend to refer not only to the activities of philanthropic foundations and of individual donors but also more broadly to a whole range of processes that allocate material and symbolic resources through nonmarket mechanisms fuelled by more or less explicitly altruistic motivations. Various phrases or terms have been used to describe part of this, or something similar to what I have in mind: the voluntary or nonprofit sector, “social capital,” and civil society more generally.