Adam Smith and "The Myth of the Invisible Hand - A View from the Trenches"

The invisible hand as an intuitive sociological explanation

“…The invisible-hand metaphor was first introduced by Adam Smith (Smith, 1950), and has since been read as explaining how general patterns of commerce -such as the creation of national wealth or division of labor -emerge as global patterns from the actions of individuals trying to succeed in their own local circumstances (although see Harrison, 2011;Kennedy, 2009, for the debate surrounding the historical use and misuse of this metaphor). The invisible hand was later proposed as a more general type of explanation for social phenomena (Nozick, 1974;Ullmann-Margalit, 1978), and became an important basis for subsequent thought on how macro-social phenomena might emerge.…”

Market Representations in Action

“…Smith published his "Wealth of Nations" in 1776 describing how when people strived to maximize their own private benefits, society also benefited as a result. It remains unclear whether Smith, a religious person, intended the invisible hand to be a metaphor or the actual intervention of God in society (Kennedy, 2009;Rothschild, 2003). A decade before Smith, Anders Chydenius (1765), a priest in Finland/Sweden, wrote a treatise of classic liberalism arguing that economic life cannot be governed from above.…”

From Petty to Smith: The Origin of Classical Political Economy in Historical- Scientific and World-System Retrospective

“…134]. А упёртые приверженцы экономического либерализма XIX в. начали ползучую реабилитацию laissez-faire выдвижением на первый план метафоры «невидимой руки», занявшей к началу XXI в. едва ли не главное место в мифологизации учения А. Смита [Kennedy, 2009].…”