Invisible hands : self-organization and the eighteenth century PDF
Preview Invisible hands : self-organization and the eighteenth century
Invisible Hands Invisible Hands Self- Organization and the Eighteenth Century Jonathan Sheehan & Dror Wahrman The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London jonathan sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. Dror Wahrman is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University–Bloomington, as well as the Vigevani Chair in European Studies and dean of humanities at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 75205- 1 (cloth) ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 23374- 1 (e- book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226233741.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sheehan, Jonathan, 1969– author. Invisible hands : self-organization and the eighteenth century / Jonathan Sheehan & Dror Wahrman. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-75205-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-23374-1 (e-book) 1. Philosophy, Modern—18th century. 2. Order—Religious aspects. 3. Social sciences—Philosophy. 4. Enlightenment. I. Wahrman, Dror, author. II. Title. B802.S47 2015 117—dc23 2014044792 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). ♾ This book is dedicated to Shani, Maya, Alice, and Jacob, self-o rganizers all. C o n t e n t s Preface ix Part 1 Prologue Europeans at the Threshold 3 1 Providence and the Orders of the World 11 2 Living with Complexity circa 1700 47 3 Man- Made Apocalypse: The Public Emergence of Self- Organization 93 Part 2 Prologue An Island of Dreams 137 4 The Order and Organization of Life 143 5 The Emergence of Mind 183 Part 3 Prologue An Island of Goats 225 6 The Secret Concatenation of Society 233 7 The Politics of Self- Organization 271 Epilogue 297 Acknowledgments 309 Notes 313 Index 363 P r e f a c e It is unusual to know who introduced a common word into the English lan- guage. It is even more unusual to have a record of its creation as a deliberate act at a particular moment. On January 28, 1754, Horace Walpole, cultural con- noisseur and correspondent extraordinaire, announced in a letter to a friend his invention of “Serendipity, a very expressive word,” in order to denote un- intended consequences and accidental discoveries. Walpole’s neologism de- rived from his idiosyncratic reading of “a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip.” It may well have also owed something to Voltaire’s Zadig; or, The Book of Fate (the title of the English edition that Walpole read upon its publica- tion in 1749), which also drew on an episode based on the Serendip princes to illustrate the play of chance and providence in human life.1 Walpole’s invention was far from serendipitous, however. The renowned sociologist Robert K. Merton asked a long time ago why it was Walpole, in the middle of the eighteenth century, to whom it fell “to fill a minute space in the English language by creating this strange new word.” Merton and his collaborator Elinor Barber suggested two answers: the contemporary interest in the Orient, and “Walpole’s idiosyncratic propensities” and eccentric inter- ests.2 Invisible Hands proposes a third answer. Viewed in the broad sweep of the period, we suggest, the significance of the space filled by “serendip- ity” was anything but minute. It was, rather, a telling clue to a sea change in the eighteenth- century West, a revolution in notions of chance and order, ac- cidents and causality, agency and aggregation. This revolution generated a host of innovations in domains ranging from religion and philosophy through science and economy to law and politics, innovations that became signature
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