By E. Courtemanche
The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored during this textual content as being way more refined and complicated than is generally understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his version of ironic causality in complicated societies and became it to their very own reasons.
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Additional info for The ‘Invisible Hand’ and British Fiction, 1818–1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism
Sample text
There are many ways of leading an action: for example in Exodus (13:21–2), the Lord leads the Israelites with a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. This provided them with a directional goal, which they then chose (more or less) to follow. When you draw a straight line with the help of a ruler, the ruler is also ‘leading’ your hand, by preventing your pencil from deviating from the line you have chosen to draw. The CEO of a company ‘leads’ it by organizing the relation of departments to each other, by buying and The Invisible Hand and the Rise of Political Economy 29 selling, hiring and firing, and so on.
Here, in a nutshell, is Smith’s prescription for the ideal social order: All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from ...
While The Invisible Hand and the Rise of Political Economy 39 their mercantilist predecessors believed that wealth was based on the rapacity that secured for the nation the richest flow of goods from colonies or other countries, the physiocrats located the source of wealth in production. But by this they meant not industrial production – which they considered ‘sterile’, a mere reorganization of wealth – but agriculture. Whatever the farmer invested in the land, in seed and water, was paid back many times over by the productive forces of nature.
