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<p>This study argues that in the eighteenth century a discourse of risk management
emerged that fundamentally reshaped the relation of man to the world by imagining
that the individual was capable of controlling aspects of life that had hitherto been
left to God or fate. This shift, moreover, established one of the defining characteristics
of modernity, linking individual autonomy to the process of managing risk in a manner
that not only remains with us today, but has been so thoroughly naturalized that we
are no longer aware of how it shapes everyday life. When eighteenth-century fiction
and philosophy first began to link selfhood to the ability to manage risk, the dangers
an individual faced were all potentially lethal threats to the body: shipwreck, cannibalism,
plague, kidnapping, rape. As the notion of individuality as a reflexive defense against
the dangers of the world came to be better established, the nature of these threats
changed. Rather than dangers to the body, social risks became the focus of authors
I call risk theorists. Individual autonomy now meant policing the boundaries of a
particular representation of oneself in society. This new formation of selfhood at
first depended on a powerful anxiety about avoiding the emotional influence of others,
but as this risk too came to seem manageable external threats melted away. What was
left were the psychological operations of an individual forced to read social cues,
knowing that failure to do so meant inviting the condemnation of others. The greatest
risk to an individual now came from their own mind when they failed to discover and
perform the right social procedures. </p><p>The study begins by focusing on the intermixed
physical and economic risks that shape the works of Daniel Defoe, who established
the need for a modern individual to circulate in a dangerous world in order to secure
for himself better standing in society. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of
the Plague Year (1722) Defoe explicitly rejects the notion that one should take the
safest path in life, forcing his protagonists to move through a world they know to
be dangerous even when that choice seems superficially unreasonable. Samuel Richardson
then translated these intermingled risks into sexual terms in Clarissa (1748), telling
the story of a woman who knows that defending herself against a rapist means risking
financial destitution. Rather than choose her virtue or her livelihood she charts
a third course, valuing her sense of self over the safety of her body and dying in
order to ensure that she controls how her story is told.</p><p>In the first two decades
of the eighteenth century, periodical writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele began
the process of rendering risk in social terms by establishing a discourse of taste
which Adam Smith takes up in both his moral philosophy and economic writings. Smith
sees the logic of good taste through to its natural conclusion in A Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759) when he defines the modern individual through his ability to seal
himself off from the poor judgment and excessive emotions of others. Smith then brings
the moderation and reserve of the individual to an economic and thus global scale
in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Finally, Jane Austen completes the internalization
of risk management in Emma (1815), where the ability to confront the dangers of the
world is rendered in fully psychological terms. Emma’s evolution as a risk manager
depends not on her capacity to seal herself from the outside world, but on her ability
to correctly read the intentions and desires of others and judge whether and how they
can be compatible with her own.</p>
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