General Will, Practical Reason, Invisible Hand

Because of Kant's explicit attention to Hume, a contrast with a colleague of the latter has gone generally unnoticed, despite having become more significant over the centuries.  Kant's Moral principle can be summarized as--Act dutifully, and leave it to a supernatural deity to reward you with personal happiness.  In complete opposition--Act selfishly, and leave it to an invisible force to arrange for general happiness--is the principle of Hume's colleague, Smith.  The structural similarity is no accident--both Kant and Smith are influenced by Rousseau, with Pure Practical Reason and the Invisible Hand, respectively, varieties of his General Will.  However, each deviates significantly from the latter.  Though Rousseau does not develop the concept of General Will systematically, indications are that he conceives it as natural collective volition, anticipating the species instinct of Darwin, constituted by active and deliberate individual civic participation.  So, Smith most sharply diverges from the latter characteristic, i. e. in promoting laissez-faire selfishness.  On the other hand, Kant does adopt Rousseau's concept of active individual participation in general volition, but only heuristically, the result of which is an abstract generality the individual parts of which remain atomized, i. e. his Kingdom of Ends.  So, Kant and Smith could be conceived as initially neo-Rousseaian rivals, the antagonism between which has grown significantly since.  For, Kant's Moral doctrine can easily be conceived as condemning at least one of Smith's fundamental principles--the deliberate neglect of the well-being of others, regardless of the exploitation that later emerges as implicitly permitted in it.  But, as is commonly the case in the standard academic segregation of Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics, the interrelation of the concepts of General Will, Practical Reason, and Invisible Hand remains typically unconsidered, so, neo-Kantian criticism of Capitalism, e. g. Rawls', is typically unfocused, and the concept of a General Will remains obscure.