The History and Theory of Risk

How can we make plans for the future in the face of the uncertainty of future events? How can we identify, or take a chance on, our best strategies of action when we do not know what is going to happen? How can we even wish for a specific outcome or goal for the future, if we cannot fully recognize all possibilities and options? Is it not part of the democratic dream that everything should be possible for everyone and not only for the privileged few? The uncertainty of the future and all its implications for our anticipatory actions and practices clearly pose an epistemological problem, especially if we believe the German historian Reinhard Koselleck that modernity is shaped by an understanding of an "open future" increasingly detached from past experiences. How then can we address the future, if history can no longer function as magistra vitae, as the Roman philosopher Cicero once famously put it? Such an idea of history and temporality now seems to have fallen into disuse, so that the political scientist Francis Fukoyama proclaimed, almost thirty years ago, that we had reached "the end of history."

The modern idea of an open future turns our future-oriented actions into a business of risk. For that reason, in An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain, Emily C. Nacol, rightly points to the overwhelming ubiquity of the subject and states that taking risks is inevitable. Questions of how to deal with uncertainty or risk (two notions that we still do not properly distinguish) are not merely highbrow issues with which only philosophers, political theorists, or historians of knowledge are engaged. Rather, everyone who has ever had to make a more or less significant life decision can empathize with the pains that can come with such a risk-weighing and decision-making process. So, in reference to François Ewald's assessment of risk, Nacol starts her analysis off by confirming that risk is intrinsically bound to human liberty. Risk thus seems to be part of the human condition, inasmuch as we can hardly imagine a world where risk is absent. However, the political theorist argues, "There was a time, when people lived without risk." The author then rightly attempts to denaturalize our notion of risk, and asserts that it "has an origin and a history" (1).

The subject of risk not only poses an epistemological challenge, but it also asks for pastoral guidance that old acquaintances like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith seem to be able to offer. Although they rarely used the actual word "risk," these authors nevertheless conceptualized the idea in order to answer the question of how we can cope with uncertainty. In this sense, An Age of Risk offers a creative account of these "theories of risk" and offers guidance for the "liberalism of anxiety" that we have inherited (124). In keeping with Michel Foucault's analysis of liberal governmentalism, where he defines liberalism as a culture of danger and fear, Nacol unravels such a "culture of persistent anxiety" in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and so helps us understand the origin of our own fears. The latter are, in Nacol's account, "traceable to the challenges of negotiating a new world understood not in terms of danger, but through the lens of Janus-faced risk" (125).

Nacol has three insights into British engagements of risk in the period. First, she offers a conceptual refinement in seventeenth-century epistemology that was triggered by the problem of an uncertain future, which led to more elaborate attention to "risk as a matter of knowledge about the future that is rooted in conceptions of time, probability, and action" (7). Second, she explains how British theorists of risk (here Nacol has mainly Locke in mind) theorized the relationship between trust and risk. Finally, she shows that these political theorists, who engaged with questions of risk, defined the character and psychology of the political subject. As Nacol states...