 Conservatism may seem to share the laissez-faire doctrine, imputed to Adam Smith, of the invisible hand—according to which, in a free market, unintended consequences of actions tend to promote the general good. The capitalist free market is held to be self-regulating; producers and consumers, acting selfishly, benefit each other, and rational economic planning disrupts the innate, benign “intelligence” of markets. The evolutionary nature and anti-statism of laissez-faire theory appeal to conservatives, but to reiterate, they would not offer doctrinaire reasons for rejecting planning. In fact, the “invisible hand” was unimportant and indeed alien to Smith (Rothschild 2001: 116–56). The allegedly neo-conservative Hayek, with his esteem for “the unconscious, the blind, the untheoretical, the imperfectly understood”, is more Burkean here (Rothschild 2001: 149; see also Scruton 2007); according to Gray, he synthesises “the deepest insights of conservatism with the best elements of classical liberalism” (2010: 124). Hayek valued local, transient, untheoretical knowledge, and advocated unfettered markets on the conservative sceptical grounds that they best realise organic social institutions. 