The Tyranny of Chance
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.