Machines, Mechanism and the Discovery of the Economy

Adam Smith’s account of commercial society as a ‘system of natural liberty’ which tends to ‘establish itself of its own accord’ and increase the wealth of nations is widely acclaimed as the defining moment of classical political economy. A century later, neoclassical economists converted Smith’s theological metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ into a science of inexorable laws of supply and demand. Outlining the mechanistic philosophy of Smith’s precursors, this chapter historicises the Newtonian aspiration of social scientists to discover timeless principles of natural law underlying social phenomena. Quesnay’s Physiocracy exemplifies the discovery of ‘the economy’ as a distinct realm of social existence. Tracing a shift in the dominant machine metaphor, from early images of the state (and the state of nature) as clockwork, through to the liberal account of freely self-regulating market mechanisms modelled on James Watt’s steam-engine governor, we consider how economists departed from the analysis of ‘economic growth’ as a biophysical process whilst aspiring to claim for their discipline the epistemic status of a ‘social physics’.