Living with the Invisible Hand: Markets, Corporations, and Human Freedom

Markets are thought of by some as liberating the individual. Rather than a feudal system in which each is assigned a role or tasks by an authority, each is free to make decisions concerning how to use their resources and direct their productive activities in light of market prices for goods and services. These prices are not dictated but reflect the preferences of individuals, aggregated by an invisible hand.

In this posthumous work, political philosopher Waheed Hussain argues that this way of thinking about markets obscures their systemic nature. He shows that a better way to think about the invisible hand is as a mechanism that drops each of us into a maze whose design is opaque to us. It liberates us from the direct bondage of a feudal system; but leaves us subordinate to an arbitrary authority, one whose character is harder to discern. Hussain locates this authority in the way the market shapes the options available to us, exercising what he calls an impersonal authority over each of us. According to Hussain, the market system is objectionable when and because it is arbitrary, governing us without giving anyone a voice concerning how the authority is exercised. This is incompatible with what Hussain takes to be fundamental to human freedom, the freedom to make choices in the face of an option set that one can make sense of as being available for good reasons, to which one can assent as a free person.

Waheed Hussain (1972-2021) was Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and previously taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a Doctorate from Harvard University and was a fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton. He wrote influential papers on consumer power, rivalry, and corporations.

Arthur Ripstein is Professor of Law and Philosophy and University Professor at the University of Toronto. He received a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and has published widely, including, most recently, Kant and the Law of War and Rules for Wrongdoers.

Nicholas Vrousalis is an Associate Professor in Practical Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has published in distributive ethics, the history of political thought, democratic theory, and Marxism. His most recent monograph, published by Oxford University Press, is entitled Exploitation as Domination.