![]() ![]() But the two are (partially) connected, and so a few preliminary words are necessary. My main interest is in liberalism as an operating sociopolitical regime built around invisible hand systems, not in liberalism as theory. ![]() The predictable reaction is liberal fideism, which insists ever more stridently on the truth of liberalism’s unverifiable and potentially self-defeating claims. Having dispensed with the superintending design of Providence in favor of contingent, indirect mechanisms, liberalism is astonished to find that there is no guiding hand to ensure the fulfillment of its own faith. ![]() Given this structural propensity toward imperfect realization of liberal invisible hand systems, liberalism stands in an unhappy, and chronically unstable, halfway posture, caught between a preliberal faith in the invisible hand of Providence and self-destructive appreciation of its own contingency. The main mechanisms are the depletion of preliberal social capital and public choice problems, both of which cause the agents posited by liberalism to act in ways that subvert the invisible hand processes themselves. Second, there are self-undermining mechanisms within liberalism itself that threaten to prevent its invisible hand systems from fully realizing their promise. 1 By the terms of their creation, it is not generally possible to verify whether they are performing as promised. First, a dilemma of verification afflicts invisible hand systems, in virtue of their indirect structure. This is no happenstance, but a consequence of systematic problems that arise when liberal theory dispenses with the invisible hand of Providence in favor of secular mechanisms. Yet liberal faith in these systems far outruns any of the social-scientific mechanisms or evidence adduced to support them. Liberalism as a concrete sociopolitical order rests upon a series of invisible hand systems: free competition in explicit economic markets, free competition in the marketplace of ideas, institutional competition among branches of government, and so on. ![]()
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