Rohan McLeod via luv-talk wrote:
[...] I contend this central economic ideology traceable back to Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"; is a pathetic , irresponsible, fatalistic economic delusion.!
"Smith's famous invisible hand was, as he says in his Theory of Moral Sentiments [...] literally the hand of God." (pp44) http://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf (emphasis added) Recall here what Smith was trying to do when he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Above all, the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of economics as a science. This meant that not only did economics have its own peculiar domain of study-what we now call "the economy," though the idea that there even was some thing called an "economy" was very new in Smith's day-but that this economy operated according to laws of much the same sort as Sir Isaac Newton had so recently identified as governing the physical world. Newton had represented God as a cosmic watchmaker who had created the physical machinery of the universe in such a way that it would operate for the ultimate benefit of humans, and then let it run on its own. Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument.² God-or Divine Providence, as he put it-had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided "as if by an invisible hand" to promote the general welfare. Smith's famous invisible hand was, as he says in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the agent of Divine Providence. IT WAS LITERALLY THE HAND OF GOD.³ ² We often forget that there was a strong religious element in all this. New ton himself was in no sense an atheist in fact, he tried to use his mathematical abilities to confirm that the world really had been created, as Bishop Ussher had earlier argued, sometime around October 23, 4004 BC. ³ Smith first uses the phrase "invisible hand" in his Astronomy (111.2), but in Theory of Moral Sentiments IV.I.10, he is explicit that the invisible hand of the market is that of "Providence. " On Smith's theology in general see Nicholls 2003:35– 43 ; on its possible connection to Medieval Islam, see chapter 10 below. See also: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments/Part_IV