BOOK

An age of risk : politics and economy in early modern Britain

Nacol, Emily C., author

2016

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: Hobbes, Thomas, 1588-1679 Philosophy. / Locke, John, 1632-1704 Philosophy. / Hume, David, 1711-1776 Philosophy. / Smith, Adam, 1723-1790 Philosophy. / Risk Philosophy. / Economics Great Britain History 18th century. / Great Britain History 18th century.
• ISBN: 9780691165103, 0691165106

Item info:

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Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
HM1101.N33 2016	1	BOOK	BUSINESS