The Swedish Banking Crisis: The Invisible Hand Shaking the Visible Hand

Author(s):  
Lars Engwall
Author(s):  
Viktor J. Vanberg

The purpose of this chapter is to take a closer look at the relation between the invisible hand paradigm that is at the heart of economists’ theoretical outlook at markets and its “visible hand” counterpart, the social contract paradigm as a theory of government. It is argued that in its generalized interpretation as an individualistic model of organized collective action the social contract paradigm consistently complements the invisible hand paradigm as an individualistic theory of spontaneous social order. What Hayek has referred to as “the two kinds of order,” spontaneous order and corporate order, can thus be accounted for within one coherent individualistic theoretical framework.


1989 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Sartori

MY SENSE OF OUR TIME IS OF A GROWING GAP BETWEEN THE good society that we seek and the ways and means of achieving it. As I have put it,Knowledge becomes more and more the problem as politics becomes more and more complicated. The growing complexity of the world of politics . . . results not only from increasing and global interdependencies, but from the very expansion of the sphere of politics. The more the visible hand and political engineering displace the invisible hand of automatic adjustments (and maladjustments), and the more politics enters everywhere, the less we are in control of what we are doing.And my conclusion repeats: ‘We are . . . living above and beyond our intelligence, above our grasp of what we are doing. The more we engage in remaking the body politic, the more I am struck by the uneasy feeling that we are apprentice sorcerers’.


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