For Hayek, the end result of the market order (say a particular distribution of income, or any other particular ‘snapshot’ of the socio-economic condition) cannot be judged ‘by criteria which are appropriate only to a single organised community serving a given hierarchy of ends’, because such a hierarchy of ends is not relevant to the ‘complex structure composed of countless individual economic arrangements’ (Hayek 1978: 183). The word ‘economy’ is in fact inadequate to describe a multitude of individual ends, because it refers to ‘an organisation or arrangement in which someone deliberately allocates resources to a unitary order of ends’. Instead, the market order, or catallaxy, does not have any particular end.
De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter 14: Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham: Market and Panopticism: Two Overlapping Orders
An economy, in the strict sense of the word, is an organisation or arrangement in which someone deliberately allocates resources to a unitary order of ends. Spontaneous order produced by the market is nothing of the kind; and in important respects it does not behave like an economy proper. In particular, such spontaneous order differs because it does not ensure that what general opinion regards as more important needs are always satisfied before the less important ones. This is the chief reason why people object to it. Indeed, the whole of socialism is nothing but a demand that the market order (or catallaxy, as I like to call it, to prevent confusion with an economy proper) should be turned into an economy in the strict sense, in which a common scale of importance determines which of the various needs are to be satisfied, and which are not to
be satisfied.
The trouble with this socialist aim is a double one. As is true of every deliberate organisation, only the knowledge of the organiser can enter into the design of the economy proper, and all the members of such an economy, conceived as a deliberate organisation, must be guided in their actions by the unitary hierarchy of ends which it serves. On the other hand, advantages of the spontaneous order of the market, or the catallaxy, are correspondingly two. Knowledge that is used in it is that of all of its members. Ends that it serves are the separate ends of those individuals, in all their variety and contrariness.
Out of this fact arise certain intellectual difficulties which worry not only socialists, but all economists who want to assess the accomplishments of the market order; because, if the market order does not serve a definite order of ends, indeed if, like any spontaneously formed order, it cannot legitimately be said to have particular ends, it is also not possible to express the value of the results as a sum of its particular individual products. What, then, do we mean when we claim that the market order produces in some sense a maximum or optimum?
The fact is, that, though the existence of a spontaneous order not made for a particular purpose cannot be properly said to have a purpose, it may yet be highly conducive to the achievement of many different individual purposes not known as a whole to any single person, or relatively small group of persons. Indeed, rational action is possible only in a fairly orderly world. Therefore it clearly makes sense to try to produce conditions under which the chances for any individual taken at random to achieve his ends as effectively as possible will be very high - even if it cannot be predicted which particular aims will be favoured, and which not.
As we have seen, the results of a discovery procedure are in their nature unpredictable; and all we can expect from the adoption of an effective discovery procedure is to improve the chances for unknown people. The only common aim whicll we can pursue by tIle choice of this technique ofordering social affairs is the general kind of pattern, or the abstract character, of the order that will form itself.
Hayek - New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas, p.183-184