Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Wide ranging, with substantial discussions of Bayle, Defoe, Locke, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Newton, Pope, Rousseau, and Vico, among others, including some lesser-known figures. . . . Recommended.”
* Choice *
“A fascinating exploration of the proliferating logics of self-organization across various Enlightenment discourses, ranging from metaphysics and political economy to botany, mathematics, and epistemology.” * Immanent Frame *
“Even if it was not his original intention, Marx . . . signaled the existence of a manifold phenomenon—economic theology. Recovering its eighteenth-century history demands the same critical rigor that Wahrman and Sheehan so admirably employ in their survey of self-organization.” * Modern Intellectual History *
“The key concept [of self-organization] develops a broad and enlightening link in the study between such disparate discursive fields as psychology, biology, mathematics and probability theory, political theory, and financial economics. . . . A detailed and thoughtfully structured work.” * Merkur *
“Jonathan Sheehan is a gifted intellectual historian; Dror Wahrman, an accomplished cultural historian. They have combined their talents and approaches here to achieve one of the richest recent books on the origins of how we moderns reason.”
* New Rambler *
“The deep research and the breadth of learning on display in
Invisible Hands are impressive. . . . Sheehan and Wahrman have done a great service by identifying a central topos and a veritable state of mind in eighteenth-century European life. Not only specialists of the eighteenth century but all historians of science and math, economic historians, and specialists of moral philosophy will reap rewards from this intelligent book.” * American Historical Review *
“The authors have provided a fascinating view into the growing culture behind the idea of divine order in the eighteenth century.” * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
"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.More questions than answers, in fact—another measure of this book’s rich and generative dialogue." * Politics, Religion, and Ideology *
“
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 Mücke, 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
