That is, in the long run and in the aggregate, human propensities and incentives will produce initially unpredictable, albeit definite and determined outcomes.
(B) that to be cause (of a SSE or within a SSE) does not require temporal contiguity between the cause and the effect. (A) that the stable consequence would not have been in “view” (or predictable) to observers of human nature at an early time and, thus, not capable of being intended. By “historical” I mean to capture two features:
To be sure, the explanatory model was probably not invented by Smith (one can find anticipations of it not just in Mandeville and Hume, but in other earlier social theorists). A SSE is an unintended consequence explanation of a certain type, and in Adam Smith's writings it is the paradigmatic case of large scale social explanation of, say, the division of labor, the origin of money, the origin of justice and morality, and even of language. And in order to exhibit this, I'll draw on my analysis of what I have called a 'Smithian Social Explanation' (or SSE this was developed, in part, by building on Jim Otteson's work). In what follows, I'd like to show how, conceptually, the invisible hand and the road to serfdom are related as ideal types. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure.-Hayek (1944 ) The Road to Serfdom, chapter 10, p. There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental by-products but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce.