An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain, by Emily C. Nicol

Abstract

In this book, Emily C. Nicol tackles a potentially vast subject. Historians such as Ian Hacking and Barbara Shapiro have traced the intellectual genealogy of the notion of risk as a calculable phenomenon and the associated rise of probabilistic approaches to knowledge. In recent years, political historians of early modern England such as Mark Knights have considered how political partisanship destabilised notions of truth, raising questions about how best to secure reliable and trustworthy knowledge on which political stability might be restored. Meanwhile, debates about the political ramifications of commercial society and the ways in which it placed limits on the realm of political action have been addressed by Istvan Hont, while, of course, the theme of trust has been central to the turn to credit in economic history initiated by the work of Craig Muldrew. All of these themes are of relevance to Nicol’s book, but she takes a more focused approach, considering how the notion of an uncertain future was addressed in the political thought of four canonical figures—Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith. Political and economic context is, in general, pushed to the margins, along with in-depth discussion of wider scholarship (largely confined to the endnotes). There is also relatively little by way of broader intellectual context: no mention of how the subject of uncertainty was dealt with in Baconian science, republican discourse, interest theory or political arithmetic, for instance, or of the broader intellectual traditions to which each of these thinkers might have been responding. While it makes for a rather narrowly conceived work, this approach does have the advantage of allowing the author to focus on her four thinkers in a sustained way, and each chapter takes the reader through their respective responses to the problem of uncertainty with admirable clarity. Indeed, this work would serve as a good introduction to the basic tenets of the political philosophies of each figure, although at times the discussion is a little too generalised and the central problem of risk disappears from view. That said, the author offers convincing readings of their respective responses to the problem of an uncertain future. Hobbes is interpreted as developing his geometrical science of politics in order to cope with the problem of political uncertainty, although, in his case, one might question whether this was an issue that was specifically projected into the future: for Hobbes, danger was an immediate threat, and uncertainty was very much in the present. Locke, meanwhile, is shown as predicating political trust on the active scrutiny of the state by its citizenship, something which required them to make predictions about the future, most notably in order to prevent the emergence of tyranny (a position that invites comparison with the ideas of the Levellers). If these two writers are shown to be tackling relatively similar political concerns, there is something of a disjunction between them and the next two individuals Nicol considers. Whereas Hobbes and Locke are preoccupied with the problem of the state, Hume and Smith are shown to be equally concerned about the personal and psychological burdens of uncertainty in a commercial society. Hume’s self-regulating commercial system is interpreted as having been constructed in order to satisfy a worried public that any losses in the present would be balanced by long-term gains, meaning that the future could be approached with optimism (the recent work of Paul Slack on the notion of happiness in the seventeenth century here springs to mind). Finally, for Smith, the mercantile system was the product of special interests deploying institutions in order to mitigate against their own reckless risk-taking, in a way that was harmful to society at large. As an antidote, he commended a prudential model of risk-taking that would strike a balance between innovation and stability. Although these chapters do not radically revise our understanding of any of the individuals concerned, by reading their works through the lens of the notion of risk Nicol successfully demonstrates their shared concerns, although the direct connections between each thinker are rather weakly established (in the introduction Nicol suggests that they were all ‘agenda setting’, but without a broader contextualisation of their ideas, the distinctiveness of their contributions is not fully established). Despite this, these concise chapters work well as stand-alone introductions to how four important early modern thinkers approached a similar problem, the unknowability of the future.