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Genre/Form: | History |
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Named Person: | Thomas Hobbes; John Locke; David Hume; Adam Smith; Thomas Hobbes; David Hume; John Locke; Adam Smith; Thomas Hobbes; David Hume; John Locke; Adam Smith; David Hume |
Document Type: | Book |
All Authors / Contributors: |
Emily C Nacol |
ISBN: | 9780691165103 0691165106 |
OCLC Number: | 942707361 |
Description: | xii, 169 pages ; 25 cm |
Contents: | Introduction -- "Experience concludeth nothing universally" : Hobbes and the groundwork for a political theory of risk -- The risks of political authority : trust, knowledge, and political agency in Locke's politics and economy -- Hume's fine balance : on probability, fear, and the risks of trade -- Adventurous spirits and clamoring sophists : Smith on the problem of risk in political economy -- An age of risk, a liberalism of anxiety. |
Responsibility: | Emily C. Nacol. |
Abstract:
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.
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"This fine study will repay the attention of those who want to understand early modern political philosophy as well as those seeking to puzzle out the native human ambivalence about risk."---Thomas W. Merrill, Review of Politics Read more...

