Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century

A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency.

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.

Author: Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 05/29/2015
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.38lbs
Size: 9.19h x 6.16w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780226752051


Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2015

About the Author
Jonathan Sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. 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. He is the author of several books, including Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age and The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England.


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