JSPES, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 2008)
pp. 472-493

The Hayekian Blogosphere: Was the Duke Lacrosse Case also a Case of the “Spontaneous Order”?

William L. Anderson

Frostburg State University, Maryland

One of the most important phenomena that came from the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case was the emergence of an influential blogosphere that mitigated some of the effects of the mainstream news media. Because this coming together of large numbers of individuals seemed to originate from nowhere, one way to examine it, as Richard Posner has suggested, is through the lens of what F.A. Hayek called the “spontaneous order.” While Hayek was referring to the social effects of a market economy, which comes about not by central planning, but by individual plans, nonetheless this blogosphere had many of the same characteristics of social cooperation by people of many different backgrounds. Further, this article will consider Cass Sunstein's criticism of the analogy to Hayek's spontaneous order.