Invisible Hands : Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century - Jonathan Sheehan

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Invisible Hands

Name: Invisible Hands
Brand: Wiley
Price: 62.99 AUD
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Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century

By: Jonathan Sheehan, Dror Wahrman

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Hardcover | 29 May 2015 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
384 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.36 x 1.62 x 0.28

Hardcover

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A synthesis of eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural developments that offers an original explanation of how Enlightenment thought grappled with the problem of divine agency.

Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systemsâ"natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and othersâ"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 worldâs disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effectâ"but with them also a new ability to imagine the worldâs 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.

Industry Reviews

"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)

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