Invisible Hands

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.

Jonathan Sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Dror Wahrman is the Vigevani Chair in European Studies 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.

— David A. Bell, Princeton University

— Dorothea E. von Mücke, Columbia University

— David Armitage, Harvard University

— Choice

— New Rambler

— Modern Intellectual History

— Merkur

— Immanent Frame

— American Historical Review

— Journal of Interdisciplinary History

— perspectivia.net

"One senses that one important goal of Invisible Hands is to make the eighteenth century seem like a familiar country. I, at least, came away from the book feeling that enlightenment writers were in important ways like us, with similar questions about apparent patterns in the world, about the relation of the individual subject to those larger patterns, and about the meaning of it all. — Politics, Religion, and Ideology