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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Economic history
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An Age of Risk - Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (Hardcover)
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An Age of Risk - Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (Hardcover)
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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.
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