The primary clue to the market theology emerges when one recognizes that the celebrated idea of �the invisible hand� is a Deist concept which sees God�s purpose at work in the world, and which, in Adam Smith�s version of it, asserts that self-seeking market agents necessarily but blindly fulfill �the public interest� by the guidance of an unseen design which operates beyond any capacity or goal of humanity. This deist metaphysic has been so deeply assumed by the economic orthodoxy bearing it that it is not seen. But it is the defining a priori framework regulating classical and neo-classical market thought. Indeed the neoliberal cast of official economic doctrine over recent decades has so prominently featured �market miracles,� �necessary sacrifices,� and �harsh punishments� for disobedience to �market laws� that the deist metaphysic has increasingly come to command belief as an Old Testament fundamentalism in modern dress.

Before we further explore the underlying theological structure of market doctrine, a caveat is in order. My paper is not exploring an analogy, but excavating an unseen meta-structure of market theory and practice in which fixed presuppositions and exclusions of alternative possibility are reified as an ultimate structure of reality. This projected structure of economic reality, in turn, is assumed to have the order of a universal and transcendent design in which humanity should be careful not to meddle.

The object of study I seek to lay bare is not, then, as with economistic critique, an ideology that merely reflects the economic base determining it, but rather, more deeply, a meta-framework of understanding which regulates the perception and understanding of mainstream market thought underneath recognition. We do not confront only a �mask� over economic reality, but an organizing structure of mind which is blind to the religio-moral metaphysic it assumes, and which regulates the economy in accordance with its assumptions. This peculiar mind-set determines market orthodoxy beneath the comprehension of even Marxian critics who, revealingly, presuppose the same metaphysic of �inexorable laws� and �necessity� ruling society �independent of men�s wills.�

The Market As God

�A theology without God is a contradiction in terms,� it might be objected, �and there is, in fact, no market God.� A theism implies the existence of God, Allah, or a Supreme Ruler, and there is no such postulate in market doctrine.

In answer to this objection, we need to keep in mind that a transcendental ruler of the market is necessarily presupposed by the very notion of �the invisible hand� which, it is believed, always brings the economy�s supply into mathematical equation to its demand. This preordained state is now called �equilibrium,� but before Keynes was canonized for generations as a perfect but factually false equivalence of Supply = Demand (�Say�s Law�). The market�s ideal and necessary serendipity of outcome by the operations of �the invisible hand� has been the unexamined teleological regulator of market discourse ever since, with different hermaneutics of meaning � beginning from its deist founder, Adam Smith, but continuing into the present as a ruling presupposition of neo-classical market reasoning. Yet from the outset, there has been no scientifically qualifying as if attached to the notion of �an invisible hand� to indicate a metaphoric purpose. Adam Smith writes that purely self-seeking investors of money capital are �led by an invisible hand� to achieve the opposite of what they aim at, the common interest, and they are infallibly regulated to achieve this with no exception (emphases added):

�It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he [the investor] has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him � to promote the public interest. He intends only his own gain, and in this, as in many other cases, is led by an invisible hand to promote an end [the public interest] which was no part of his intention.�1

Note that there is no conditionality to this account, not of time or of place or of circumstance. There is also no specification of the investment of the market agent, or of the commodity he is supplying or demanding. There is indeed no qualification of the society whose public good is said to be secured, nor account of the public interest itself � which changes names to �common welfare� or �aggregate utility,� but maintains the necessity of benevolent outcome by market operations. It follows then that with no limiting concept or criterion to rule it out, the �public interest� is necessarily achieved, according to this doctrine, by investment enterprises competing to provide commodities to the market at the lowest price, including homicidal weapons, junk �food or prostituted children.

These problems are not posed as problems because it is assumed in principle without causal tracking of the cases that pursuit of investor money gains necessarily serves the �public interest.� The assumption is