A Truly Invisible Hand

Critical theory has long resisted the notion that an “invisible hand” can operate within the real social dynamics of a free market. But despite the most radical desires of the socially critical imagination, the optimization of that “spontaneous order” or depersonalized way of ordering things known as “the economy” has become the dominant playing field and decisive electoral issue of modern politics. Within this broad contemporary context, Michel Foucault made a strange theoretical intervention that, to this day, continues to baffle readers. During a lecture, he argued that Adam Smith's invisible hand was, after all, truly and purposively, that is, for technical rather than ideological reasons, “invisible.” This article argues that there is a counter-positivism or tactical irony contained within the logic of such a controversial thesis; namely, that when one acknowledges that the principle of economic competition encourages an efficient self-organizing effect at all times, regardless of context, one is also immediately in a position to appreciate why the art of government should always maintain its political primacy over the spontaneous order of the market.

The Death of Data in Neoliberal Times

We need new ways of making the everyday world visible through disruptive empirical methodologies that privilege social justice and utopian acts of critical imagination.

Radical Steele: Popular Politics and the Limits of Authority

In modern critical imagination, Richard Steele is almost always seen as Joseph Addison's friend and collaborator, as half of the periodical essay-writing team devoted to the promotion of civility, urbanity, and a moral and well-mannered lifestyle. Scholars focus almost exclusively on the Tatler, the Spectator, and Steele's sentimental drama, The Conscious Lovers (1722), virtually ignoring his substantial canon of party journalism and pamphlets. Partly because of Steele's bitter and extensive quarrel with Jonathan Swift—or because most scholars assume that Swift got the best of him—he is now rarely taken seriously as a political player in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. This essay focuses on Steele the party writer—and especially on his attitude toward religio-political authority and the sanctity of vox populi. Though Steele is now described as (like Addison) “not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics,” he was for excellent reasons regarded by contemporaries as a writer not only trying to politicize the people but actually succeeding in doing so. This essay attempts to recontextualize Steele's polemical contributions; he has been read alongside Addison and other Whig wits, but he rarely figures in discussions of the history of political ideas in early eighteenth-century England, in discussions of debates about authority, resistance, and the nature of obligation, about public religion and liberty of conscience, the political implications of heterodoxy, and the use of reason as a challenge to dogmatic clerical authority.

Afterword

The disparate approaches to English pastoralism considered within this book—whether evoking scenes and characters from classical poetry, depicting an imaginary past or a hoped-for future, responding to the landscape, commenting on contemporary social and political challenges, providing spiritual sustenance for the living, or eulogizing the dead—firmly banish outdated clichés of it as little more than folky-wolky roister-doistering. Instead, pastoralism stands revealed as a subtle and flexible expressive mode capable of transcending the circumstances and surroundings of its creation, conveyed by a distinctive and highly adaptable array of stylistic traits. But in the wake of Finzi’s death in 1956 and Vaughan Williams’s only two years later, English pastoral music fell into relative obscurity. Composers who had written pastoral works in previous decades (including Howells, Ireland, and Bliss) had either largely turned away from the idiom or limited it to certain smaller-scale or niche contexts (such as church music, in Howells’s case). Meanwhile, the rise of both a prominent British avant-garde musical movement during the later 1950s and an extraordinarily vital pop music scene in the following decade made it difficult for the older, less demonstrative pastoral style to hold the public or critical imagination....