End-independent legal rules and the political economy of expanding market societies of Europe

The political economy of the expanding markets of Europe is crucially tied to the Kantian quality of end-independence of rules that coercive authorities may legitimately enforce. A formal statement of this basic property of market societies requires a foray into the meta-mathematics of undecidable propositions. Using the premise first mooted by F.a. Hayek that market outcomes are complex phenomena, it is shown that they belong to the class of undecidable propositions, i.e. they are not amenable to constructive rationalism and human design. The non-purposiveness or the end-independence of the rules coordinating the market order, follows as a logically corollary. In the creation of a larger market order with EEC, these rules can be observed to emerge from a negative selection process — rules are progressively eliminated as unjust as they cannot be ‘universalized’ over what is now a larger territory and peoples.