In the late 1940s Hayek was in the midst of his own attempt to describe the philosophical foundations of the market society, a project that would consume much of his remaining career. A de cade earlier he had begun publishing work that provided an epistemological justifi cation of his economic views. He increasingly represented himself as a theorist of ignorance, arguing that each individual had only a tiny fraction of the available information about the world within which he or she operated. Given these severe constraints on the individual’s capacity for comprehension, the challenge of the modern social order was to maximize the cumulative knowledge of its many constituents. Hayek was deeply suspicious of any response to these problems that relied on what he described as rationalism, "the product of an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason and of a consequent contempt for anything which has not been consciously designed by it or is not fully intelligible to it." Instead, he advocated for a humbler sensibility that emphasized the irrationality and fallibility of humankind, an approach that he specifi cally associated with "En glish individualism." Adherents of this antirationalist philosophy would respect the market as a mode of ordering social interactions that was capable of assimilating the unique knowledge of its constituents without subjecting them to any unitary plan. Although they would not hesitate to limit the exercise of coercive power, they would be suspicious of attempts to rationalize an economy or society, because such enterprises tended to overemphasize the knowledge of a few individuals and thereby to constrain the contributions of the many.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 278