Order

[1967]  Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves,  The Notion of the State, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967

-  "The moral of Montesquieu's story [the Troglodytes in "Lettres Persanes"] seems fairly simple. Government is redundant for men who are truly virtuous. In fact, government may be an excuse for dispensing with virtue altogether. If men followed reason there would be no need for the State. The moral is not substantially different from that of the old fable of the golden age. For what is redundant is the coercive machinery of the State, but not order as such; quite the contrary. It is the rule of reason that makes the peaceful, happy coexistence of human beings possible. They are better off without the State, but only in so far as they are reasonable." (p. 156)

[1973]  E. F. Schumacher,  Small is Beautiful, Economics as if people mattered, Harper & Row, New York, 1975

-  "We always need both freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coordination. When it comes to action, we obviously need small units, because action is a highly personal affair, and one cannot be in touch with more than a very limited number of persons at any one time. But when it comes to the world of ideas, to principles or to ethics, to the indivisibility of peace and also of ecology, we need to recognise the unity of mankind and base our actions upon this recognition." (p. 65)

[1980]  Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman,  Free to Choose, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1983

-  "Consider ... language. It is a complex structure that is continually changing and developing. It has a well defined order, yet no central body planned it. No one decided what words should be admitted into the language, what the rules of grammar should be, which words should be adjectives, which nouns. The French Academy does try to control changes in the French Language, but that was a late development. It was established long after French was already a highly structured language and it mainly serves to put the seal of approval on changes over which it has no control." (pp. 44-45)

[1996]  Matt Ridley,  The Origins of Virtue, Softback Preview, England, 1997

-  "Order emerges perfectly from chaos not because the way people are bossed about, but because of the way individuals react rationally to incentives. There is no omniscient priest in the top temple, just the simplest of conceivable habits."
"Governments, in the shape of rajahs or socialists, has done nothing to create the system; it only levies tax." (p. 198)