In her book, Emily C. Nacol offers a welcome analysis of the emergence and significance of the concept of risk in the history of British political thought. “Risk” is here conceived as largely synonymous with “uncertainty,” and the four thinkers on which the book focuses—Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith—are shown to have dedicated parts of their projects to developing institutional and epistemic strategies designed to help us cope “with the uncertainties of politics and economics” and with “managing a contingent future” (p. 2).

After a brief introduction, An Age of Risk turns to Hobbes. Of the four thinkers it profiles, Hobbes is most inimical to risk, and is here presented as engaged in a “heroic attempt to displace uncertainty from political life” (p. 3). His preeminent contribution to this project is his conception of “unified sovereign power” designed to “eliminate” uncertainty (p. 11). But Nacol also emphasizes the degree to which Hobbes conceived of a science of politics, built on the foundations of “geometric method” and “incontrovertible proof” (p. 11) as a partner in the project of eliminating uncertainty. At the same time, this project is ultimately judged a “failure” (p. 13), as efforts to “marry certain knowledge with secure politics” simply “cannot settle definitively” the issue of uncertainty (p. 126). As such, the author judges Hobbes’s argument most interesting “for what it reveals about the impossibility of such an audacious project” (p. 13).

Hobbes thus “begins an important conversation” (p. 126) that is left to his successors to carry on, starting with Locke. Where Hobbes is risk averse, Nacol praises Locke for his “relative comfort with the permanence of uncertainty and his acceptance of risk as a part of common life” (p. 4). For him, the issue is less how to eliminate risk than to show how we can live with risk given its “permanent character” and the fact that it “can never be displaced” (p. 44). Nacol’s survey of Locke’s efforts to address this challenge covers ground ranging from his theory of government power as a fiduciary trust to his contributions to the debate over the coinage crisis of the 1690s. But his epistemology is presented as his preeminent contribution to risk management, for it is here that we see how “Locke accepts uncertainty and uses the tools of probabilistic knowledge to start conceiving the future in terms of calculable risk” (p. 42). Probabilistic reasoning specifically enables subjects to reconceive the future in terms of calculable risks, rather than “sheer uncertainty” (p. 44).

The next chapter turns to Hume. Hume likewise accepts uncertainty as inevitable in modern commercial society, and thus seeks to provide “advice on the difficult question of how to live with risk” (p. 69). This leads Nacol to examine Hume’s own theory of probabilistic reasoning, and especially his analysis of the “psychological effects of uncertainty and probability” (p. 80). The key claim here is that thinking probabilistically can make us more fearful and risk averse by encouraging “anxiety and dread” (p. 80). Nacol argues that Hume’s moral and political essays constitute his most direct attempt to ameliorate these potentially destabilizing passions by teaching us how “to live well against a backdrop of uncertainty” by learning how “to take better risks,” especially in commercial pursuits (p. 85; cf. pp. 90, 94–96).

The final chapter examines Smith, whose main contribution to risk theorizing is also described as normative. For Nacol, it consists partly in his recommendations concerning how institutions such as trading companies might be better structured so as to minimize risk (p. 99). Yet Smith also disaggregated two approaches to commercial risk taking in order to show the moral and practical superiority of one to the other. The “pathological approach to risk” (p. 5) is exemplified by speculators and profiteers who not only engage in risky ventures in pursuit of big short-term gains but at the same time use monopoly and government protections to shield themselves from loss (p. 106). The alternative and preferable approach he presents in his account of prudence—a virtue that “while not terribly heroic” (p. 120) nevertheless encourages an incremental approach to bettering one’s condition that Smith thought more likely to lead to both commercial success and psychological tranquility in the long term.

All told, both general readers and specialists will find much to like in this book. The former will benefit from its lucid account of Hobbes’s conception of the relationship of civil science to absolutist government (p. 34 ff.). Historians of philosophy and political thought will profit from Nacol’s nuanced treatment of the ways in which Locke conceived of resistance to tyrants as predicated on epistemic virtues of “timing, prediction, and anticipation,” as well as judgment (pp. 59–60). And as an Adam Smith specialist who has long been intrigued by the sixth (1790) edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, I found especially impressive Nacol’s development of the possible influence of Jeremy Bentham’s Thoughts on Usury (1787) on Smith’s revisions (p. 114 ff).

Two points, however, might be raised about the larger treatment of risk in the book. One challenge the project faces is that these thinkers rarely take “risk” as an explicit or direct category of analysis. Nacol herself notes this, reminding us that “Hume rarely uses the word ‘risk’” (p. 96), that Smith seems “to engage with the problem of risk only episodically” (p. 98), and that Locke’s engagement with risk is “fairly implicit” (p. 64) outside of his economic writings. To justify the larger claim that these thinkers can be profitably seen as theorists of risk despite their relative silence on risk, Nacol reinterprets elements of their systems through the lens of uncertainty. In several instances these reinterpretations are fruitful. But others seem less compelling. For example, when we are told that for Hobbes, uncertainty is “the problem to be solved by theorists of politics” (p. 38; italics in the original), it is hard to shake the sense that fear of violent death is much more directly and explicitly the problem Hobbes is concerned to solve. So, too, Nacol argues that Hume’s use of the essay form was meant to provide “an antidote to the fear he diagnoses as a symptom of a commercial society” (p. 85). But there are many other ways of accounting for Hume’s shift to essay writing—not least of which was his concern to command a larger audience for his ideas and sell more books. Here and elsewhere, some readers may then wonder whether simpler and less risk-focused explanations might not better capture the intentions of these authors at certain points.

Second, some readers might wish for a clearer sense of how these early modern authors can help us better make sense of the risks we face today. Nacol rightly emphasizes “the ubiquity and permanence of risk in our contemporary relations with each other” (p. 1), resulting in “a culture of anxiety that still haunts us today” (p. 126). That rings true. But are the risks we face the same as those that the early modern thinkers addressed? Today we live under the constant threat of the existential annihilation of our planet and our species as a result of forces over which most of us have no power whatsoever. Some of the risks that most concerned the eighteenth-century theorists—“Should I invest in this scheme or that?”—seem almost quaint by comparison. So what can such thinkers teach us about how to live with the specific and unique risks that define our own world? It is to be hoped, given her insightful treatment here of the relationship of risk to anxiety, that Nacol might examine aspects of this challenge in future work.