![]() Law, legislation and liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy, vol. Studies in philosophy, politics and economics. Journal of the History of Ideas 72: 29–49. Adam Smith and the history of the invisible hand. ![]() Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1st ed., 1767). An essay on the history of civil society, ed. Adam Smith on the providential reconciliation of individual and social interests: Is man led by an invisible hand or misled by a sleight of hand? History of Political Economy 22: 341–352.įerguson, A. An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, 2 vols. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Ĭampbell, R.H., A.S. In The new Palgrave dictionary of economics, ed. In The Elgar companion to David Ricardo, ed. Journal of the History of Economic Thought 34: 475–490.Īspromourgos, T. ![]() The machine in Adam Smith’s economic and wider thought. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 17: 1169–1182.Īspromourgos, T. “Universal opulence”: Adam Smith on technical progress and real wages. The science of wealth: Adam Smith and the framing of political economy. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Īspromourgos, T. The final part of the essay considers some other lines of interpretation of the invisible hand: as an expression of the “providence” of God or Nature the idea that marginalist general equilibrium theory, particularly with respect to the supposed normative properties of equilibrium, is a fulfillment of Smith’s invisible-hand doctrine and the invisible hand as a notion of “spontaneous order.” JEL ClassificationĪrrow, K.J., and F.H. It is further shown that some ways in which Smith characterizes philosophy also point to the invisible hand capturing a notion of social science as uncovering hidden causal connections. This is followed by an assessment of a number of other cases where Smith argues for unintended system-level consequences of behavior at the level of individuals, at least two of which are of greater significance for Smith’s thought, and for social science, than the narratives in which Smith explicitly employs the metaphor. This entry provides a close and critical reading of the three instances in Adam Smith’s extant writings where he has explicit recourse to the metaphor of the invisible hand.
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