Jonathan Sheehan is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Dror Wahrman is the Vigevani Chair in European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of several books, including Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age.
“Wide ranging, with substantial discussions of Bayle, Defoe, Locke,
Mandeville, Montesquieu, Newton, Pope, Rousseau, and Vico, among
others, including some lesser-known figures. . . .
Recommended.”
*Choice*
“A fascinating exploration of the proliferating logics of
self-organization across various Enlightenment discourses, ranging
from metaphysics and political economy to botany, mathematics, and
epistemology.”
*Immanent Frame*
“Even if it was not his original intention, Marx . . . signaled the
existence of a manifold phenomenon—economic theology. Recovering
its eighteenth-century history demands the same critical rigor that
Wahrman and Sheehan so admirably employ in their survey of
self-organization.”
*Modern Intellectual History*
“The key concept [of self-organization] develops a broad and
enlightening link in the study between such disparate discursive
fields as psychology, biology, mathematics and probability theory,
political theory, and financial economics. . . . A detailed and
thoughtfully structured work.”
*Merkur*
“Jonathan Sheehan is a gifted intellectual historian; Dror Wahrman,
an accomplished cultural historian. They have combined their
talents and approaches here to achieve one of the richest recent
books on the origins of how we moderns reason.”
*New Rambler*
“The deep research and the breadth of learning on display in
Invisible Hands are impressive. . . . Sheehan and Wahrman have done
a great service by identifying a central topos and a veritable
state of mind in eighteenth-century European life. Not only
specialists of the eighteenth century but all historians of science
and math, economic historians, and specialists of moral philosophy
will reap rewards from this intelligent book.”
*American Historical Review*
“The authors have provided a fascinating view into the growing
culture behind the idea of divine order in the eighteenth
century.”
*Journal of Interdisciplinary History*
"One senses that one important goal of Invisible Hands is to make
the eighteenth century seem like a familiar country. I, at least,
came away from the book feeling that enlightenment writers were in
important ways like us, with similar questions about apparent
patterns in the world, about the relation of the individual subject
to those larger patterns, and about the meaning of it all.More
questions than answers, in fact—another measure of this book’s rich
and generative dialogue."
*Politics, Religion, and Ideology*
“Invisible Hands is a landmark piece of work, a brilliant
excavation of eighteenth-century patterns of thought. Sheehan and
Wahrman demonstrate in a virtuoso manner that eighteenth-century
thinkers came to discern the same fundamental quality of
self-organization at work in many different systems. The authors
often wax lyrical, beautifully so, in their exploration of their
topic, and do not shy away from posing questions of profound
philosophical import. This book will cause a stir.”
*David A. Bell, Princeton University*
“Sheehan and Wahrman offer exciting insights into the discourses of
order and self-organization, which informed such disparate domains
as the emerging life sciences, concepts of human cognition,
politics, and economics. The reader is skillfully guided on a
complex journey of discovery, at times through arcane archives,
which are opened up for new and creative uses. Enjoyably witty,
this is a most engaging read for anybody interested in the
intersections of intellectual and cultural history.”
*Dorothea E. von Mücke, Columbia University*
“Free markets; non-linear systems; chaotic dynamics: our world
seems always at the mercy of uncertainty but still mysteriously
orderly. Sheehan and Wahrman ingeniously locate the origins of our
anxieties about self-organization in the busy, bruising world of
the early Enlightenment. Invisible Hands is itself something of a
miracle of organization, drawing together the histories of theology
and botany, political economy and epistemology, mechanics and
medicine, into an unsettling but strangely satisfying whole.”
*David Armitage, Harvard University*
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