Political Science
Vanderbilt University

Curriculum Vitae

My research project returns to early modern British theories of statecraft and political economy to gain a fresh perspective on one of the most pressing political and economic problems of our time: How should we cope with risk, given that it is very often simultaneously a threat to security and an opportunity for profit?  I consider how risk emerged as a critical concept in British accounts of politics and political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  My chosen texts are familiar ones to political theorists and philosophers—those of canonical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith.  The project offers new interpretations of these familiar works by arguing that risk and its management are central, and not peripheral, to their accounts of the production of knowledge and proper forms of political and economic order. But further, epistemological, political and economic writings from this period suggest a the emergence of a novel orientation towards the future—one in which it becomes an object of calculation, prediction, and human control. The texts I study also provide a detailed mapping of the emotions bound up with new these projects of calculation and control, most notably those of fear and hope.  My work thus focuses on British debates about political order, economic order, and the production of scientific knowledge to ask how imagining the future in terms of risk reconfigured political authority and subjectivity in early modernity.

Emily Nacol is a political theorist at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests lie primarily in the history of political thought, especially early modern political theory. In particular, her work focuses on the intersection of knowledge and politics in early modernity. Nacol is currently at work on a book manuscript, Governing Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain. The book traces our current attitudes to risk to their early modern roots and asks how attention to and shifts in thinking about risk, and related conceptions of danger and uncertainty, produced a complex and nuanced conversation about the relationship among knowledge, politics, and order in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writing on politics and political economy. Nacol’s teaching interests include ancient and early modern political thought, theories of capitalism and political economy, and democratic theory.  After completing her doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago in 2007, she held a research fellowship at Brown University’s Political Theory Project.

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