It is important to understand how this refracted the very notion of radical ignorance as a natural state of being for humankind in the later political economy of Hayek. In this conception, the process of coming-to-know became largely disengaged from the knower, with most of the action happening at the subconscious level. As he wrote in his ‘Primacy of the Abstract’, ‘the formation of a new abstraction seems never to be the outcome of a conscious process, not something at which the mind can deliberately aim, but always a discovery of something which already guides its operation’

Philip Mirowski & Edward Nik-Khah