Invisible hands

• Verfasst von: Sheehan, Jonathan
• Verfasst von: Wahrman, Dror
• Titel: Invisible hands
• Titelzusatz: self-organization and the eighteenth century
• Verf.angabe: Jonathan Sheehan & Dror Wahrman
• Verlagsort: Chicago, Ill. [u.a.]
• Verlag: The University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2015
• Umfang: XVIII, 375 S.
• Illustrationen: Ill.
• Format: 24 cm
• Fussnoten: Includes bibliographical references and index
• ISBN: 978-0-226-75205-1
• ISBN: 0-226-75205-4
• Schlagwörter: (s)Ordnung / (s)Philosophie / (s)Religion / (s)Aufklärung
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Rezensiert in: Zabel, Christine, 1983 - : Rezension von Jonathan Sheehan: Dror Wahrman Invisible Hands. Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century
• RVK-Notation: NN 5110
• K10plus-PPN: 810662434

Abstract

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.