Of course, there was always a more unsettling possibility: that economic life wasn’t governed at all. In addition to the language of conspiracy, nineteenth-century artists made liberal use of the theme of chaos, representing in paint and ink what one historian has argued was a new belief that “sudden, utterly unforeseeable, extreme turns of wealth” were a matter of chance.

The anarchic, libidinous crowd was a favored motif. “The Stock Exchange As It Appeared at the Height of the Erie Excitement,” printed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1872, portrayed Wall Street as a cacophonous melee of investors driven by rumors, urges, and instincts – a far cry from the calculating plutocrats of “Caught in the Tape” or “Hoarding Gold” and from the contained and mechanical economic body of “Uncle Sam Sick with La Grippe.” William Holbrook Beard’s “The Bulls and Bears in the Market” (1879) made the animal spirits unleashed by commerce more visible by transforming New York bankers into literal bulls and bears. Unlike in “Caught in the Tape,” no one class is manipulating the other as much as they are all careening into one another in a desperate, irrational attempt to sate their appetites for profit. 

Chaos and conspiracy marked a middle ground between older notions of economic fate as punishment or reward for moral behavior and modern notions of economic performance as consequence of sound technical management. Unlike the religious idiom, these illustrations cast doubt on whether the small individual was really responsible for his or her economic experiences, extending the equally troubling possibilities that success was random or inversely related to morality, a reward for manipulation. Unlike the language of health and sickness, they questioned whether the economic realm was a contained and rational whole, suggesting that it was either a field of power and conflict, winners and losers, or of arbitrary chance.