Hayek, Marriage, and Social Change

Jesse Walker of Reason Magazine takes a look at a “Hayekian argument” against same-sex marriage and concludes that real social change comes from the people. From the article:

This is why I don’t buy what has been called the Hayekian argument against gay marriage, after F. A. Hayek, the economist and philosopher who celebrated social orders that emerge from below rather than being imposed from above. Jonathan Rauch—who doesn’t buy the argument either—summed it up in a 2004 article for Reason. The position, he wrote, “warns of unintended and perhaps grave social consequences if, thinking we’re smarter than our customs, we decide to rearrange the core elements of marriage. The current rules for marriage may not be the best ones, and they may even be unfair. But they are all we have, and you cannot re-engineer the formula without causing unforeseen results, possibly including the implosion of the institution itself.”

My objection: Marriage isn’t being re-engineered by social planners. It is evolving in an impeccably Hayekian fashion, as folkways appear on the ground and are gradually ratified by imitation, then market acknowledgement, and then, only lastly, by the law. For eons, same-sex couples have quietly lived as though they were married. As social mores changed and gays came out of the closet, so did those longtime-companion relationships. Before long, lovers were holding their own marriage ceremonies, which were not recognised by the government or (at first) by any established church but did carry weight with family, friends, and neighbors. Couples started to draw up marriage-like contracts, in an effort to establish rights privately that they couldn’t acquire publicly. Businesses had to decide whether to extend benefits to gay spouses; with time, more and more did.

All this happened without legislators or judges taking the lead. It happened because a certain number of gay people wanted to live as married, then slowly established institutions that allowed them to do so. Legalizing gay unions—I don’t really care if the government calls them “marriages,” because what’s important is what everyday people call them—doesn’t rearrange a core social institution. It recognises a rearrangement that is already taking place.