Emily Nacol, Ph.D.
emily.nacol@utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
City: Toronto, Ontario
Country: Canada
About Me:
As a researcher, my primary area of interest is early modern political thought, especially British political thought and political economy in the 17th and 18th centuries. My research focuses on the problems of risk and uncertainty in early modernity. My first book, An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (Princeton UP, 2016) is about these themes. I am now exploring two new projects: one on poverty and risk in the history of political thought, and another on plague-writing in political thought.My teaching interests are broad and include ancient and modern political thought, theories of risk, the history of political economy and capitalism, and democratic theory and practice. I belong to the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Graduate Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
Research Interests
Political Theory
Political Economy
History Of Ideas
Early Modern/Enlightenment
Political Economy
British Studies
Uncertainty And Risk
Publications:
Journal Articles:
This article examines two discussions of prostitution by eighteenth-century social theorist Bernard Mandeville and argues that how a society perceives and names risk reflects less about concrete dangers than about desires to preserve social order. Mandeville addresses his writings to anxious members of a commercial society who were specifying risk and assigning blame against a backdrop of widespread corruption. His calls for the legalization of prostitution expose the pervasive moral uncertainty and vice that animate a commercial society and raise questions about the purported social benefits yielded by the persecution of prostitutes, who Mandeville represents as simply one class of vicious commercial actors among many. His work suggests that the public designation of prostitution as a moral risk is a feeble attempt both to soothe generalized fear about the immorality of commerce and to buttress a cherished social order. Mandeville’s writings thus can be interpreted as an early engagement with the politics of risk and blame.
This article focuses on the interplay of risk, trust and the possibility of reliable political knowledge in Locke's political thought. Locke's work captures in a nuanced way the shifting power relations and asymmetries that characterize all trusting relationships, and it supports the insight that we often understand what trust is retroactively – that is, when it is betrayed. The article first delineates Locke's basic assumption that political life is plagued by uncertainty and chaos. It then analyzes his modeling of political relations as a kind of fiduciary trust in light of this assumption, situating prerogative as the limit case of political trust. A consideration of Locke's views on revolution as the moment of broken trust emphasizes that scrutinizing and testing trust, while difficult cognitive work, is a task to be performed continuously in politics. Locke thus presents an account of political agency that emphasizes the crucial role of thought alongside action.
Books Written:
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. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk—risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, Nacol locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, she argues, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope. By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, An Age of Risk demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.
Book Chapters:
In The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock shows how Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentine political thinkers adapted Aristotelian and Polybian insights to create a paradigm of republican political thought that was sensitive to the problem of stabilizing civic virtue against inevitable political decay in time. This republican paradigm, he famously insists, traveled to eighteenth-century Anglo-American contexts via the work of James Harrington and helped political thinkers make sense of two seemingly disparate events—the rise of finance in Britain and the American Revolution—in civic republican terms. Pocock’s insistence that The Machiavellian Moment is a work of history does not negate its contributions to political theory. First, it is a significant text for political theorists who attend to the role of language and discourse in political thinking, although the Pocockian approach bears limitations worth acknowledging. Second, Pocock’s work is critical to the republican revival in contemporary political theory, because he centers and defends Florentine and Anglo-American republicanisms as political discourses worthy of scholarly attention. Lastly, The Machiavellian Moment appears, in hindsight, as a foundational text for scholarship in the history of political economy, particularly the pre-history of finance and credit.
Media Appearances:
Blog Posts:
In this blog post, I draw on early modern thinker Daniel Defoe to explore how health insurance programs are might promote democratic principles of solidarity and equity.