ABSTRACT
The rise of economic liberalism largely coincides with the rise of economics as a discipline. Since economic liberalism is supposed to ensure the protection of political liberalism, it seems like the contemporary idea of the invisible hand is something about which people should be very wary indeed. The all-encompassing metaphor of the civil society, in contrast, is much more in tune with economic liberalism and therefore political liberalism than the rather narrow and constraining metaphor of the invisible hand. G. W. F. Hegel's work on economic liberalism initially and most directly influenced German-speaking political economists is true, but his work also had a definite impact on many English-speaking political economists, for a generation of these was heavily influenced by their German-speaking teachers. Within the Anglo-American world, economic liberalism is generally viewed as the intellectual offspring of Adam Smith, and neoliberalism its sole contemporary heir. Neoliberalism therefore fails even as a self-contained economic theory.
