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European liberal natural law

This anti-rationalist approach to human affairs, for Hayek, was the same which guided Scottish enlightenment thinkers, such as Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson, to make their case for liberty. For them, no one can have the knowledge necessary to plan society, and this "natural" or "spontaneous" order of society shows how it can efficiently "plan" bottom-up. Also, the idea that law is just a product of deliberate design, denied by natural law and linked to legal positivism, can easily generate totalitarianism: "If law is wholly the product of deliberate design, whatever the designer decrees to be law is just by definition and unjust law becomes a contradiction in terms. The will of the duly authorized legislator is then wholly unfettered and guided solely by his concrete interests." This idea is wrong because law cannot be just a product of "reason": "no system of articulated law can be applied except within a framework of generally recognized but often unarticulated rules of justice."