ABSTRACT
The invisible hand is perhaps the most famous phrase to have emerged from Adam Smith’s writings. This chapter builds on previous work on unintended consequence explanations and argues that the metaphor as used by Smith, helps us to make a useful conceptual distinction within various forms of what might broadly be called spontaneous order or social evolutionary arguments. To do so, it will critique recent interpretations that have sought to account for Smith’s use of the invisible hand and spontaneous order in terms of providentialism, and those that have stressed the importance of pattern prediction as a feature of Smith’s Science of a Legislator. This chapter argues that Smith’s analysis has no active role for providence, instead relies on social scientific explanation, and that his acute awareness of the unintended consequences of social actions undermines interpretations that seek to read him as favouring a more interventionist role for the legislator based on those social scientific pattern predictions.
