Their own interaction (appears) as a process and force independent of them. Because circulation is a totality of the social process, it is also the first form in which not only the social relation appears as something independent of individuals as, say, in a coin or an exchange value, but the whole of the social movement itself. ⁹

What is remarkable about the movement of these reflections is that they seem to identify two things which have most often been thought to be very different from each other as concepts: Hobbes's 'bellum omnium contra omnes' and Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' (here appearing disguised as Hegel's 'ruse of reason'). I would argue that Marx's concept of 'civil society' is something like what happens when these two concepts (like matter and anti-matter) are unexpectedly combined. Here, however, what is significant is that what Hobbes fears is somehow the same as what gives Smith confidence (the deeper nature of Hobbesian terror is in any case peculiarly illuminated by the complacency of Mr Milton Friedman's definition: 'A liberal is fundamentally fearful of concentrated power.' ¹⁰ The conception of some ferocious violence inherent in human nature and acted out in the English revolution, whence it is theorized ('fearfully') by Hobbes, is not modified and ameliorated by Hirschman's 'douceur du commerce': ¹¹ it is rigorously identical (in Marx) with market competition as such. The difference is not political-ideological but historical: Hobbes needs state power to tame and control the violence of human nature and competition; in Adam Smith (and Hegel on some other metaphysical plane) the competitive system, the market, does the taming and controlling all by itself, no longer needing the absolute state. But what is clear throughout the conservative tradition is its motivation by fear and by anxieties in which civil war or urban crime are themselves mere figures for class struggle. The market is thus Leviathan in sheep's clothing: its function is not to encourage and perpetuate freedom (let alone freedom of a political variety) but, rather, to repress it; and about such visions, indeed, one may revive the slogans of the existential years -- the fear of freedom, the flight from freedom. Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies ('socialism is impossible') and that we are fortunate in possessing an interpersonal mechanism -- the market -- which can substitute for human hubris and planning, and replace human decisions altogether. We only need to keep it clean and well oiled, and it now -- like the monarch so many centuries ago -- will see to us and keep us in line.

Why this consoling replacement for the divinity should be so universally attractive at the present time, however, is a different kind of

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