I worry that this is too empty a notion of freedom; while there is certainly some value in negative liberty, without more positive content, such as that which a good ethical system can provide, anomie threatens.
What's more, it seems to me that a freedom that is the absence of coercion must treat law as solely a check upon license. Law is for the wicked, liberty is for the good, and as Lincoln so pithily said, one cannot have a right to do a wrong.
(But now the question: what about laws that make one drive on the right side of the road? They are coercive, and a restraint on the liberty of the good. Yet they are also necessary for an ordered liberty. Hmm.)
They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful.
Republican Rome and Democratic Athens, to which Hayek favorably alludes, both failed to survive. If I may reverse Plato's schema in the Republic, and use men as metaphors for states, both Christ and Socrates failed to survive. How is survival to be a reliable measure of political regimes in our fragile, mortal world?
It is not necessary that the reasons of the institution should be evident unto us. It is sufficient that they are instituted laws that give a certainty to us, and it is reasonable to observe them though the particular reason of the institution appear not.
How shall we evaluate the reasonability of the institution without knowing the particular reason?
I suspect an answer presents itself in this Stanley Hauerwas essay:
I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment.
Alisdair MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneaology, and Tradition further reflects on the importance of tradition in the formation of ethical(and thus political) reasoning, while further outlining the problems of overleaping rationalism. I do not know what Hayek has to say on this topic, though I'm certainly looking forward to learning.
Sub-chapter 6 deals with that, or at least makes his first start until later in the book.
His Gifford Lectures. Very informative.