The Visible Hand on the Land

Adam Smith famously coined the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ to describe a capitalist market that was driven by individual aspirations and promises for profits but produced, somehow miraculously, something resembling a common good. Although the image of the invisible hand appeared in a rather marginal and fleeting passage in The Wealth of Nations , it became a key metaphor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic language and thinking. 1 Despite its alluring imaginary, the metaphor did not go uncontested. Rexford Tugwell, an economist who played a key role in designing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agrarian New Deal in the 1930s and served as director of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, sarcastically wrote in 1935 that the image of the invisible hand provided nothing more than a rhetorical veil to conceal ‘the destructive forces of the unrestrained competition’ that had been wrongfully portrayed as the ‘Siamese twin’ of democracy. But now, Tugwell wrote, ‘the jig is up. The cat is out of the bag. There is no invisible hand. There never was. [. . .] We must now supply a real and visible guiding hand to do the task which that mythical, nonexistent, invisible agency was supposed to perform, but never did.’ In the eyes of Tugwell, social and economic planning were fundamentally important for increasing the visibility of the ‘guiding hand’. Tugwell regarded planning not as something that was detrimental to democracy but rather as something that prevented democracy from being ‘stifled by competition’. 2 Already a few years earlier in 1932, Tugwell had delivered a paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association in which he portrayed economic and social planning by government agencies as a necessary instrument to find a way out of the ‘disasters of recent years’ and associated the concept and the practice of planning with a ‘possible mastering of future history’. 3

Agency (philosophy) · Agrarian society · Democracy · Metaphor · Nothing · Rhetorical question · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · European history and politics