Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century
- ISBN-10
- 0226752054
- ISBN-13
- 9780226752051
- Series
- Invisible Hands
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 375
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015-05-29
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Authors
- Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman
Description
In Invisible Hands, the historians Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman identify a defining feature of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: the decline of God as a source of order in favor of a new model of self-organization.” Sheehan and Warhman provide a novel account of how people on the threshold of modernity understood the continuing presence in the world of apparent disorder, randomness, and chance. If God no longer actively guaranteed that order will always prevail, what or whom did? The answer, the authors argue, was a new appreciation for complexity, new understandings of causality, and new functions for the divine hand. At the foundation of this novel way of thinking was the ability to imagine complex systems--be they natural or human--asself-organizing. Invisible Hands maps and explains the intensifying presence of the languages of self-organization throughout the eighteenth century, proliferating as they did with ever greater sophistication across numerous intellectual domains and cultural arenas. For self-organization was less a theory than a field of new insights: insights into the dynamics of chance and randomness, into the relationship between agency and determinism, into the role of God in a world without hands-on providence.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2022-12-06
- 394 pages
- Paperback
- University of Chicago Press
-
- 2015-05-29
- 384 pages
- Ebook
- University of Chicago Press
Similar books
-
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal
By Kim Phillips-FeinThe company's president in the 1940s, Charles E. Wilson (“Electric Charlie”), a blustering for— mer boxer whose craggy face bore the traces of punches thrown long before, whipped up the crowd with pugilistic challenges to competitors ...
-
The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
By Steven DrobnyContains revealing interviews with top hedge fund managers who survived and prospered through the 2008 financial crisis Outlines investments and strategies for the rocky road ahead Reveals how hedge fund managers are seeking a new paradigm ...
-
The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
By Steven DrobnyDivulges how top financial professionals are looking forward by thinking clearly, managing risk, and seeking a new paradigm of profit making opportunities in the post-crisis world Outlines investments and strategies for the rocky road ahead ...
-
Landscape with Invisible Hand
By M. T. AndersonNational Book Award winner M. T. Anderson returns to future Earth in a sharply wrought satire of art and truth in the midst of colonization.
-
Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
By Kim Phillips-FeinA narrative account of the efforts of influential businessmen Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and Jasper Crane to roll back the New Deal outlines their dramatic campaign to promote an "ideological revolution" that ultimately supported conservative ...
-
The Invisible Hand
By Adam SmithThey have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
-
Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs
By Deirdre RoysterAfter seriously examining the educational performances, work ethics, and values of the black men for unique deficiencies, her study reveals the greatest difference between young black and white men—access to the kinds of contacts that ...
-
The Essential Adam Smith
By Adam SmithAdam Smith emerges from this collection of his writings, as he does from his portrait in Professor Heilbroner's well-known book, as the first economist to deserve the title of "worldly philosopher."
-
Machines, Bodies and Invisible Hands: Metaphors of Order and Economic Theory in Adam Smith
By Stefano FioriThe Oxford Universal Dictionary Illustrated on Historical Principles (Vol. 1, 3rd ed.). Clarendon Press. Pascal, B. (1995 [1670]). Pensées and Other Writings. Oxford University Press. Rescher, N. (1991). G.W. Leibniz's Monadology.
-
The Invisible Hand in Economics: How Economists Explain Unintended Social Consequences
By N. Emrah AydinonatAddressing the controversial concept of the invisible hand, this book questions, examines and explicates the strengths and weaknesses of the concept by analyzing its paradigmatic examples such as Carl Menger's Origin of Money and Thomas ...