Invisible Hands : Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century / Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sheehan, Jonathan, Author.

Wahrman, Dror, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy, Modern--18th century.

Philosophy, Modern.

Order--Religious aspects.

Order.

Social sciences--Philosophy.

Social sciences.

Enlightenment.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (394 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Prologue: Europeans at the Threshold

1. Providence and the Orders of the World

2. Living with Complexity circa 1700

3. Man-Made Apocalypse: The Public Emergence of Self-Organization

Prologue: An Island of Dreams

4. The Order and Organization of Life

5. The Emergence of Mind

Prologue: An Island of Goats

6. The Secret Concatenation of Society

7. The Politics of Self-Organization

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226233741

022623374X

OCLC:

910847933