These are the murderers of Time, the crusaders of Sameness, the lovers of fatality. These are the sectarians of order, the reason-addicts, the go-between people. The Great Legends may indeed be dead, as the post-modern vulgate often claims,…What Foucault's listeners are here supposed to know well and which he refrains from pointing out, is that at the end of the 20th century, the image of piloting, that is, management, became the cardinal metaphor for describing not only polit…The contemporary history of economic discourse must be looked at from the angle of this increasing problem of information. From the crisis of 1929 to 1945, economists' attention was focused on questions of anticipation, uncertainty regardin…
Adam Smith
economist · 4 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Smith's foundational concept of decentralized market ordering appears here as a historical reference point against which contemporary critiques of automated systems and information management are positioned—the readings invoke his invisible hand logic to argue that complexity management through markets was already a cybernetic problem dressed in eighteenth-century language. The excerpts suggest that modern economic discourse inherited Smith's faith in distributed decision-making even as digital systems and information theory transformed what "decentralization" and "discipline" actually mean in practice. His work anchors a genealogy showing how market ideology, cybernetic control, and management metaphors became intertwined across the twentieth century.
Background
Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the field of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by many as the "father of economics", or the "father of capitalism", he is primarily known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is regarded as his magnum opus, marking the inception of modern economic scholarship as a comprehensive system and an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of divine will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic, legal, environmental and technological factors, as well as the interactions among them. The work is notable for its contribution to economic theory, particularly in its exposition of the concept of absolute advantage.
Wikipedia →Mentioned in 2 readings
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