What was Adam Smith's intellectual laboratory? How did his economic theory take shape? Were his metaphors of order only residual and ornamental expressions? This book answers these questions by analyzing the formation of the concepts of market and social order in Adam Smith's work, by...

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Part 1. Machines, Bodies, and Invisible Hands -- Chapter 2. Metaphors as conceptual tools -- Chapter 3. The metaphor of the machine -- Chapter 4. Smith and the organic metaphors -- Chapter 5. The invisible hand -- Part 2. Visible and Invisible Orders: The Secrets of...

Tiziano Raffaelli (Pisa 1950) was a widely esteemed scholar in the field of the history and methodology of economics, who died suddenly in January 2016 while still in the midst of working and of developing projects for new lines of research. He was a philosopher of science by formation and a...

The aim of the paper is to show that Adam Smith elaborated a distinctive image of nature related to economic discourse. In Smith, visible events (or interdependencies) must be connected to invisible principles which, in particular, should provide an explanation of the self-coordination processes...