Rothschild offers five reasons for concluding that Adam Smith did not like the idea of the invisible hand:
(a) The agents controlled by invisible hands in his work are "undignified: they are silly polytheists, rapacious proprietors, disingenuous merchants" (Rothschild 320).
(b) Invisible-hand theories diminish the rational subject's power of action, self-mastery, making it seem as if individuals are not as free as Smith, an enthusiastic liberal individualist, would like them to be.
(c) The invisible hand presupposes an emperor's-new-clothes type of relation between the blind ordinary people to whom the hand truly is invisible and the theorist who sees the hand and can make it visible to others. As Rothschild notes, "This knowingness of the theorist is characteristic of 18th- and 19th-century doctrines of unintended consequences; when G. W. F. Hegel talks of the cunning of reason, he is also talking of his own cunning" (320). This is not only condescending; it leaves economic agents vulnerable to those who would manipulate their actions in the name of the "market"--something Smith disapproved of.
(d) The implicit deism or even spiritualism of the invisible hand (especially as it was read in the nineteenth century) was foreign to Smith's own agnostic temper.
(e) The invisible hand in the context of Smith's argument in The Wealth of Nations was a kind of politically useful "trinket" (Rothschild 321), a rather silly and simplistic reduction of political and habitual forces that Smith didn't like and was engaged in theorizing in far more interesting ways.
