For every (pseudo-)economist who still preaches the “invisible hand” like scripture: let’s revisit Adam Smith’s actual words—the first of only two appearances of the phrase in his entire corpus (Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759):

The rich… “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants… When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.”

Let the irony sink in.

Even the most hardened market apologist should recognise that for Smith, the invisible hand is explicitly the hand of God—he’s writing theodicy, not economics.

The invisible hand is not an autonomous market mechanism—it is a reified description of what specific institutions produce under specific conditions. It’s invisible because Smith made a category error: mistaking a contingent institutional outcome for a universal coordinating principle. Markets are coordinated not by metaphysical forces as such, but by institutions, laws, norms, and power.

As Joseph Stiglitz observed: "The reason the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there."

We have worshipped a metaphor Smith barely used, stripped it from its theological context, elevated it to natural law, and deployed it to sanctify whatever institutional arrangements benefit incumbent power.

Which, even by the standards of modern economics, is remarkably dumb.

But of course it conveniently enables a theological inversion: by presenting structural outcomes as inevitable rather than the product of human agency, neoliberal economics depersonalizes responsibility, recasting intentional acts of power as if they continued to be the impersonal ‘invisible hand’ of some (perhaps even misguided) market deity.

Yet, whatever we call "natural" or "free" markets are political constructions all the way down - and ultimately the remit of both personal and organizational responsibility.

Read the actual texts. Question received orthodoxy. Don’t settle for mediocre thinking.

#PoliticalEconomy #Leadership #IntellectualHistory #CriticalThinking #ReadTheBooks