ADAM SMITH AND THE ROLE OF THE METAPHOR OF AN INVISIBLE HAND

Daniel Klein and Brandon Lucas's ‘In a Word or Two, Placed in the Middle: The Invisible Hand in Smith's Tomes’, following a vague hint by Peter Minowitz (2004) , offers original physical evidence that Smith ‘deliberately placed the phrase “led by an invisible hand”– at the physical centre of both his masterworks’. Further, it suggests that the invisible‐hand paragraphs are a response to Rousseau (1755 ); and that in ‘numerous and rich ways’, centrality holds ‘special and positive significance in Smith's thought’. This paper acknowledges the physical centrality of the invisible‐hand metaphor, but questions whether centrality alone gives weight to wider claims that the ‘invisible hand’ was Smith's ‘central idea’. It draws upon Smith's Rhetoric Lectures (1763), and argues that the invisible‐hand paragraphs in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations identify the actual objects of the invisible‐hand metaphor. This paper insists that Adam Smith is the most reliable source for revealing what he meant. In contrast, most modern attributions of special meaning to Adam Smith's use of the metaphor ignore Smith's teaching on the use of metaphors and, instead, make numerous, and often mutually exclusive, claims that Smith had a ‘doctrine’ of ‘an invisible‐hand’.     

IN A WORD OR TWO,PLACED IN THE MIDDLE: THE INVISIBLE HAND IN SMITH'S TOMES

We explore the conjecture, first hinted at by Peter Minowitz, that Smith deliberately placed his central idea, as represented by the phrase ‘led by an invisible hand’, at the physical centre of his masterworks. The four most significant points developed are as follows: (1) The physical evidence: the expression ‘led by an invisible hand’ occurs pretty much dead centre of the 1st and 2nd editions of The Wealth of Nations (WN), and of the final edition of the tomes containing The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). (2) The rhetoric lectures show that Smith not only was conscious of deliberate placement of potent words at the centre, but thought it significant enough to remark on to his pupils, noting that Thucydides ‘often expresses all that he labours so much in a word or two, sometimes placed in the middle of the narration’. (3) The invisible‐hand paragraphs in TMS and WN both contend with Rousseau and hearken back to the Rousseau passages that Smith had translated and provided in his 1756 article on literature. (4) There are numerous and rich ways in which centrality and middleness hold special and positive significance in Smith's thought.     

LIBERTY BETWEEN THE LINES IN A STATIST AND MODERNIST AGE: UNFOLDING THE ADAM SMITH IN FRIEDRICH HAYEK

This article interprets F. A. Hayek as having been constrained by the statism and modernism of his times, and as writing in a way that obscured some of his central ideas. I suggest that between the lines we can see a focus on liberty understood hardily as others not messing with one's stuff– even though Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty defined liberty in ways that tended to obscure this hardy definition, and Hayek often used code words like ‘competition,’‘the market,’ and ‘spontaneous’ where ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ would have been plainer, albeit more offensive to the culture. Seeing the hardy definition of liberty between the lines in Hayek enables us to see his focus on the liberty principle and his case for a presumption of liberty. Such a reading of Hayek, I suggest, is true to Adam Smith, who expounded a central message that by and large the liberty principle holds, and that it deserves the presumption in our culture and politics.     

Adam Smith's moral foundations of self-interest and ethical social order

This article draws on textual evidence from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations to address mistaken interpretations of Adam Smith's fundamental concept of self-interest as greed that has been said to have had a corrosive influence on markets, commercial behaviour, and widening inequality. To the contrary, Smith's complex set of human motivations, including self-interest, his economic system that is based on free markets, and institutional frameworks governing productive property rights and the rule of law are argued to increase aggregate wealth, improve the position of those least well off, and maintain ethical social order.