Libertas ex machina? : human freedom, the invisible hand, and the mechanistic worldview in Adam Smith's philosophy of science

As with many philosophers of the modern period, Smith's thought was highly influenced by the advent of modern, Newtonian physics as well as by the so-called mechanistic worldview. However, the adoption of this theoretical paradigm leads to an aporia, i. e., to a fundamental problem, within practical philosophy: if the whole universe and all its phenomena are but reduceable to simple mechanical movements of the mechanisms of an all-encompassing "great machine of the world" - and therefore perfectly determined - how could human freedom be possible? How can there by freedom within the machine? The article at hand discusses the adoption of the mechanistic worldview in Smith's writings and possible Smithian solutions to the aporia. Based on a mainly epistemological interpretation of Smith's invisible hand metaphor, it is argued, as an attempt at providing a new Smithian solution to the aporia, that Smith did not fully adopt the mechanistic worldview; instead - as in Kantian philosophy -, freedom would ought to be understood as a necessary practical-philosophical assumption underlying human action.