Polanyi published the term 'spontaneous order' in 1948, over a decade before it appears in Hayek's own work

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Michael Polanyi began explicitly using the term "spontaneous order" in his essay "The Span of Central Direction" — first published 1948 and reprinted as chapter 8 of The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (1951). Per Struan Jacobs's textual comparison of the two men's 1941–1951 writings, the term does not appear in Friedrich Hayek's own work until The Constitution of Liberty (1960), where it is used on only two pages — "one of them reproducing a passage from Polanyi's The Logic of Liberty" (Jacobs 1997, p. 14). Read against the popular association of "spontaneous order" almost exclusively with Hayek, the priority runs the other way: Polanyi is in print with the phrase more than a decade earlier, and Hayek's first recorded use quotes Polanyi back.

The Polanyi side of the claim is grounded at Tier 1 against the primary text; the Hayek side — that the term is absent from Hayek's own writing before 1960 — rests on Jacobs's reading (Tier 2, a named scholar's direct comparison in the Polanyi Society's own journal) and is the priority claim's load-bearing negative. That verification is routed to question-verify-hayek-first-published-use-spontaneous-order.

This sits in the vault's priority-and-attribution territory alongside moc-attribution-and-origin-myths, and folds into the biography of the person-bridge traced in observation-michael-polanyi-person-bridges-three-vault-clusters-invisible-to-vault-bridge. That the disagreement was never staged by Polanyi himself is a separate finding: see claim-polanyi-1951-logic-of-liberty-names-hayek-only-three-times-not-in-spontaneous-order-chapters.