TY - BOOK AU - Nacol,Emily TI - An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain SN - 9780691165103 AV - HB103.A2 U1 - 330.1540941 23 PY - 2016///] CY - Princeton, NJ : PB - Princeton University Press, KW - Economics KW - Great Britain KW - History KW - 17th century KW - 18th century KW - Risk KW - Philosophy KW - PHILOSOPHY / Political KW - bisacsh KW - Adam Smith KW - David Hume KW - John Locke KW - Lockean political trust KW - Michel Foucault KW - Thomas Hobbes KW - civil war KW - commerce KW - commercial actors KW - early modern Britain KW - early modern period KW - economic risk KW - eighteenth century KW - future uncertainty KW - geometry KW - human ambivalence KW - knowledge KW - liberalism KW - mercantile policies KW - monopolies KW - moral theory KW - nineteenth century KW - philosophical skepticism KW - political authority KW - political economy KW - political order KW - political risk KW - political subject KW - political theory KW - political thought KW - political trust KW - probabilistic calculation KW - probability KW - risk control KW - risk prediction KW - risk taking KW - risk-taking KW - risk KW - safe political community KW - security threat KW - seventeenth century KW - uncertainty KW - unknown future KW - writings N1 - 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; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400883011?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400883011 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9781400883011.jpg ER -