This page is referenced by:

• 1 2017-07-19T08:38:24-07:00 The Tyranny of Chance 9 plain 2017-09-04T16:03:40-07:00 For centuries, religious leaders in Europe and early America attributed economic swings to divine judgment. In the 1840s and 1850s, this providential worldview was gradually offset by a secular emphasis on chance. Art played a critical role in this shift, depicting the national economy as a vessel randomly tossed by the tempestuous seas rather than a subject of other-worldly guidance.
  
  Transportation furnished one of the most common visual metaphors for conveying the chaotic nature of economic change. In literature, descriptions of choppy seas, tropical storms, and capsize and shipwreck pervaded discussions of economic life. In art, painters and illustrators expressed panic or collapse as a close relative of train crashes and horse-bucking – other unpredictable events that often resulted in colossal injury.
   
  The anarchic, libidinous crowd was also a favored motif. Consider the vision of the economy offered by an 1873 illustration of the New York Stock Exchange or that found in William Holbrook Beard’s 1879 painting The Bulls and Bears in the Market. Economic activity is not patient and rational here, nor is it ordered by God, the Devil, or the individual moral man. Instead, it is random and cacophonous, driven this way and that by rumors, urges, and animal instincts.