Invisible Hands
Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century
Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems – natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others – whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world's disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect – but with them also a new ability to imagine the world's orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction.
In "Invisible Hands", Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, "Invisible Hands" is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.
About the Author
Jonathan Sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dror Wahrman is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University-Bloomington, as well as the Vigevani Chair in European Studies and dean of humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Reviews
"'Invisible Hands' is a landmark piece of work, a brilliant excavation of eighteenth-century patterns of thought. Sheehan and Wahrman demonstrate in a virtuoso manner that eighteenth-century thinkers came to discern the same fundamental quality of self-organization at work in many different systems. The authors often wax lyrical, beautifully so, in their exploration of their topic, and do not shy away from posing questions of profound philosophical import. This book will cause a stir" – David A. Bell, Princeton University
"Sheehan and Wahrman offer exciting insights into the discourses of order and self-organization, which informed such disparate domains as the emerging life sciences, concepts of human cognition, politics, and economics. The reader is skillfully guided on a complex journey of discovery, at times through arcane archives, which are opened up for new and creative uses. Enjoyably witty, this is a most engaging read for anybody interested in the intersections of intellectual and cultural history" – Dorothea E. von Mucke, Columbia University
"Free markets; non-linear systems; chaotic dynamics: our world seems always at the mercy of uncertainty but still mysteriously orderly. Sheehan and Wahrman ingeniously locate the origins of our anxieties about self-organization in the busy, bruising world of the early Enlightenment. 'Invisible Hands' is itself something of a miracle of organization, drawing together the histories of theology and botany, political economy and epistemology, mechanics and medicine, into an unsettling but strangely satisfying whole" – David Armitage, Harvard University
