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...