HES: Re: DISC--Smith and Invisible Hand

[Richard Adelstein]

In all the talk about Smith and the invisible hand, I'm surprised 
that no one has mentioned the first four chapters of WN, in which 
Smith contrasts the planned division of labor in the pin factory to 
the spontaneously ordered division of labor in the broader marker and 
develops a theory of the evolution of the latter that links the 
changing particulars of the division of labor to the changing 
particulars of its environment, more than eighty years before the 
publication of a very similar idea in The Origin of Species.

Theories of spontaneous order, including both Smith's and Darwin's, 
have been cited by many scholars as scientifically respectable ways 
to unmask the invisible hand -- why not give Smith credit for this 
originating this strikingly modern point of view?

Rich Adelstein