Abstract
Some features of Smith’s theory can be better appreciated if compared with the theoretical developments that took place in the life sciences of his time. What Smith’s economic theory and coeval biological knowledge had in common was the shift from the analysis of observable interdependencies to the analysis of the order (or organization) engendered by invisible forces which account for social and economic coordination.
In some respects, the invisible hand was similar to the image adopted by Théophile Bordeu, who described the natural body as a “swarm of bees” which behaves as a unitary system, although it is formed by distinct insects. Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot and scholars of the Medical School of Montpellier also maintained that life cannot be explained in mechanical terms, and the visible dimensions of biological phenomena must necessarily refer to unknown forces which fix the organization of living beings.
Smith’s notion of order had some elements in common with these medical and physiological conceptions, although economic theory and the sciences of life essentially revisited their analytical tools independently. This chapter discusses how these approaches changed the foundations of the two disciplines.
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Notes
- 1.
This was related to the decline of preformation theory: “As long as living organisms were perceived as combinations of visible structures, preformation provided the simplest explanation for the persistence of those structures through succeeding generations. The linear continuity of the living world in space and time required a continuity of form through the actual process of generation” (Jacob, 1973: 74).
- 2.
More precisely, Buffon denied the idea of continuity among species, although he believed that there is a continuity within species (Reill, 2005: 49–50).
- 3.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840) dealt with vital forces as a concept close to a Newtonian type of force. Haller (1708–1777) assumed that the physiology of fibers depends on irreducible vital forces such as irritability. In turn, Needham (1713–1781) suggested the existence of a “vegetative force”, as a principle of generation and development of living beings; Wolff (1733–1794) identified a “vis essentialis” as a vital principle that works on organic matter by coordinating simple parts into more complex structures. Prochaska (1749–1820) introduced the Newtonian method in the life sciences and compared attractive and nervous forces.
- 4.
On the nature of the reciprocal influence of the two approaches, the debate is still open. Demeter (2016, chap. 7) maintains that Hume provided a vitalistic account of human nature, and traces of a vitalistic outlook are present in Smith and Ferguson. By contrast, Wolfe (2018) criticizes the connection that some scholars identify between vitalist and Smithian/Humean notions of sympathy.
- 5.
These debates in part reflected the need to answer the mind-body problem developed by Descartes in his mechanistic approach (Bourke, 2012: 435–436).
- 6.
Hume , too, emphasized the relationship between sympathy and the body and metaphorically described it as a “contagion” of passions “in which the ideas of the mind become, in some unexplained way, impressions of the body” (Packham, 2012: 64).
- 7.
The “element of invisibility” expressed in the “invisible hand”, Foucault maintains, is rooted in the market system: “Invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect nature of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything that each individual does on their own account. Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good” (Foucault, 2008: 280).
- 8.
As Vigo de Lima and Guizzo (2015: 589–90) summarize , in “the classical episteme or ‘the age of representation’, the space occupied by things and their visibility (their surface) were privileged”, while in the episteme of the modern age the basic trait was that “representation could no longer provide the foundation of knowledge by itself”. See also Versieren (2016).
- 9.
Foucault argues that the differences between Quesnay and Smith can be examined by considering how they dealt with the problem of visibility. Quesnay conceived economic inquiry as an analysis which, by illustrating visible relationships, can be useful to the political authority. The Tableau offered “the sovereign a principle of analysis and a sort of principle of transparency in relation to the whole of the economic process” (Foucault, 2008: 285). By contrast, Smith’s invisible hand showed that the legislator does not possess this knowledge, because “the world of the economy must be and can only be obscure to the sovereign” (ibidem: 280).
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Fiori, S. (2021). Organization and Invisible Forces in the Life Sciences of the Late Eighteenth Century. In: Machines, Bodies and Invisible Hands. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85206-1_8
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