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Abstract
Friedrich von Hayek and Stafford Beer met exactly once, at the “1960 Symposium on the Principles of Self-Organization,” hosted by the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Beer, best known for engineering socialist Chile’s CYBERSYN project, and Hayek, the neoliberal thought leader, were joined in the belief that safeguarding human liberty would require globe-spanning institutions to buttress a self-organizing world economy, which both thinkers conceived of in biological terms. The transactions of the 1960 symposium reached the Polish intellectual and fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, who advocated for a novel type of world information economy, neither socialist nor capitalist, which nevertheless bore a striking resemblance to the visions articulated on both sides of the iron curtain by Beer and by Hayek. To identify the features that made self-organization appealing to a cohort as ideologically incoherent as Beer, Hayek, and Lem, I delve into the historical epistemology of emergence. I argue that thinking self-organization required an epistemic system of resemblance, which made the world an available category of analysis and biological metaphors a useful analytics. I uncover proposed alternatives to neoliberal market governance and cast Austrian neoliberals’ own proposals in a strange, new light.