An Age of Risk : Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain / Emily Nacol.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nacol, Emily, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics--Great Britain--History--17th century.

Economics.

Economics--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Risk--Philosophy.

Risk.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (185 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In An Age of Risk, Emily Nacol shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Nacol explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control.In these early modern sources, Nacol contends, we see three crucial developments in thought on risk and politics. While early modern thinkers differentiated uncertainty about the future from probabilistic calculations of risk, they remained attentive to the ways uncertainty and risk remained in a conceptual tangle, a problem that constrained good decision making. They developed sophisticated theories of trust and credit as crucial background conditions for prudent risk-taking, and offered complex depictions of the relationships and behaviors that would make risk-taking more palatable. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk-risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, Nacol locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, she argues, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope.By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, An Age of Risk demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One. Introduction

Chapter Two. "Experience Concludeth Nothing Universally". Hobbes and the Groundwork for a Political Theory of Risk

Chapter Three. The Risks of Political Authority. Trust, Knowledge, and Political Agency in Locke's Politics and Economy

Chapter Four. Hume's Fine Balance. On Probability, Fear, and the Risks of Trade

Chapter Five. Adventurous Spirits and Clamoring Sophists. Smith on the Problem of Risk in Political Economy

Chapter Six. An Age of Risk, a Liberalism of Anxiety

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9781400883011

1400883016

OCLC:

957700372