Freedom and the Invisible Hand: Hussain on the Judgment-Bypassing Character of the Market

Abstract Waheed Hussain’s Living with the Invisible Hand argues that, although the market economy is valuable for efficiently coordinating production and consumption, it is morally problematic because it draws us into patterns of activity that bypass our own judgment as rational beings. This makes the market potentially “authoritarian.” But what exactly does it mean to say that the market “bypasses our judgment”? In this article, I seek to clarify this idea and suggest that Hussain has actually identified a few separable senses in which it might be true. These different senses are important to distinguish because they call for different remedies.