The conspiracy of the invisible hand: Anonymous market mechanisms and dark powers

New German Critique

Volumn , Issue 103, 2008, Pages 51-64

  Tanner, Jakob ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH   (Switzerland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40449135413     PISSN: 0094033X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/0094033X-2007-018     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Umberto Eco, Im Wald der Fiktionen: Sechs Streifzüge durch die Literatur (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994).
2. See also Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007).
3. Katja Hürlimann, Henry McKean Taylor, and Andreas Volk, eds., "Verschwörung!- Conspiration!" special issue, traverse: Zeitschrift für Geschichte/Revue d'histoire 33, no. 3 (2004).
4. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Entightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
5. Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997).
6. This hypothesis of a new type of conspiratorial plot is criticizing the assumption that occult knowledge has been handed down from generation to generation since antiquity. Such a position is found in Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy: The Dark Side of Politics from Ancient Egypt until Today (London: Rider, 1989). However, some patterns of a conspiratorial narrative can be tracked back to the Renaissance.
7. See David S. Baker, The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (London: Cape, 2005).
8. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried On in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (Edinburgh, 1798);
9. Augustin de Barruel [Abbé Barruel], Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme, 4 vols. (London, 1797-98).
10. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 4 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 456. The metaphor of the invisible hand is sparingly used by Smith but became one of the most powerful propositions in economic theory.
11. See Duncan K. Foley, Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
12. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
13. Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
14. Stefan Andriopoulos, "The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel," English Literary History 66 (1996): 739-58.
15. The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription, www.archives.gov/ national-archives-experience/charters/declaration_transcript.html.
16. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
17. Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826-1836 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
18. David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 1971).
19. Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (New York: Scribner, 1954);
20. Steven Watts, The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Knopf, 2005);
21. Richard Bak, Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).
22. Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).
23. See also Jakob Tanner, "'Bankenmacht': Politischer Popanz, antisemitischer Stereotyp oder analytische Kategorie?" Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 43, no. 1 (1998): 19-34.
24. The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, ed. Dearborn Independent, 4 vols. (London: Briton, 1920-21).
25. For a newer edition see Henry Ford, ed., The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003).
26. Henry Ford, Der internationale Jude, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hammer, 1922).
27. Hammer-Verlag characterized a later, undated version as erroneously attributed to Henry Ford. This admission was traceable to growing anti-Americanism in the German right-wing movements. In the same context, many publications fueled conspiracy theories after World War I. See, e.g., Karl Heise, Die Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Weltkrieges and Zum Verständnis der wahren Freimaurerei (Basel: Finckh, 1919);
28. Friedrich Wicht, Weltfreimaurerei, Weltrevolution, Weltrepublik: Eine Untersuchung über Ursprung und Endziele des Weltkrieges (Munich: Lehmann, 1919);
29. Theodor Fritsch, ed., Die zionistischen Protokolle: Das Programm der internationalen Geheimregierung (Leipzig: Hammer, 1920);
30. Gottfried zur Beek [Ludwig Müller], ed., Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion (Charlottenburg: Vertag "Auf Vorposten," 1920);
31. Alfred Rosenberg, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jüdische Weltpolitik (Munich: Boepple, 1923);
32. and Erich Ludendorff, Vernichtung der Freimaurerei durch Enthüllung ihrer Geheimnisse (Munich: Fortschrittliche Buchhandlung, 1927).
33. International Jew, 1:9.
34. See Urs Lüthi, Der Mythos von der Weltverschwörung: Die Hetze der Schweizer Frontisten gegen Juden und Freimaurer -am Beispiel des Berner Prozesses um die "Protokolle der Weisen von Zion⇆1i]: (Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1992);
35. and Norman Cohn, "Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion": Der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Baden-Baden: Elster, 1999). The complicity of the Russian secret police may be itself a false assumption; see the contribution of Michael Hagemeister in this issue.
36. International Jew, 1:15, 16, 20.
37. For the relevance of this self-promotion as a successful nation see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A History of the American Genius for Invention (New York: Penguin, 1989);
38. and David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
39. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 459.
40. International Jew, 1:14, 142, 149.
41. Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 284.
42. See also Max Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin's, 2003).
43. Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1986).
44. Politically, Girardet is a historian in a nationalist tradition. This has sharpened his insight into the relevance of the mythological dimension of politics in the framework of modern democracies. The relevance of mythologies for national history is also emphasized by Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890-1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993).
45. See Arjun Appadurai, "The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition," in Culture and Public Action, ed. Rao Vijayendra and Michael Walton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59-84.
46. Howard, Occult Conspiracy, 95.
47. See Amartya K. Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006);
48. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).