Adam Smith wasn’t laissez-faire: Samuel Gregg responds to Adrian Vermeule
To Adrian Vermeule, the theory at the core of liberalism is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the name Smith gave to the process through which participants in the market indirectly benefit from the collective actions of self-interested individuals. Likewise, Vermeule argues, “Liberalism as a concrete sociopolitical order rests upon a series of invisible hand systems: petition in explicit economic markets, petition in the marketplace of ideas, petition among branches of government, and so on.” But using the invisible hand to define...