Wie erklärt man mit unsichtbaren Händen? /
How Can Invisible Hands Explain?

Kuehne, Ulrich J. (1997) Wie erklärt man mit unsichtbaren Händen? /
How Can Invisible Hands Explain?.

Abstract

The article presents a survey of what is meant in the social sciences by an "invisible hand explanation", dealing in special with the ideas of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Carl Menger, Friedrich August von Hayek, Robert Nozick and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, and evaluates whether these explanations meet the standards of sound scientific arguments. The answer is affirmative with two different kinds of invisible hand explanations (IHE), the "causal-mechanical"-IHE and the "functional-evolutionary"-IHE.