THE TAO OF MARKETS: SIMA QIAN AND THE INVISIBLE HAND

Abstract Adam Smith's famous doctrine of the Invisible Hand, introduced in the Wealth of Nations in 1776, was anticipated by the great Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian (145–87 BC) in his Records of the Historian . Sima Qian's statement is deeper in that, unlike Smith, he links the “invisible hand”’explicitly to the price mechanism. Their analyses had a common philosophical foundation: the characteristically Chinese concept of a general, spontaneous natural order. They arrived at their similar conclusions by applying this concept to a similar contemporary issue in political economy ‐ the appropriate extent of government intervention. More intriguing, if more equivocal, is the possibility of a direct intellectual debt through the agency of A. R. J. Turgot and two Chinese who were visiting Paris as guests of the Jesuits just before Adam Smith's famous visit to the same city.