This chapter examines the sense of uncertainty fostered by postwar geopolitics. It looks at how the political orientations shaped during the interwar period were dislocated from postwar Italo-Egyptian relations and from emergent Mediterranean constellations. The fall of the fascist government in Rome in 1943 and the creation of the Egyptian republic in 1953 made uncertainty a defining condition of life for Italian residents in Egypt after the war. Their experiences no longer resonated with the political aspirations of the post-fascist state, nor did they align with Egypt’s accelerating movement towards national sovereignty. The material and symbolic exchange of two deposed kings – Vittorio Emanuele III in 1946 and Faruk in 1953 – and the establishment of the Italian and Egyptian Republics paved the way for new industrial and economic ties. Political-economic relations tightened around this kinship of exchange, and the Italian state sought to reinforce Egypt’s military government. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, many Italian residents fell into greater duress, coming to understand departure as their only possible future.

The final chapter investigates the nature of the 1918 transition from Empire to Republic. It opens with the lack of street lighting which persisted in the postwar years and symbolized the slow change from war to peace, and from old regime to democracy. The continuity between the two regimes and the continuation of wartime conditions were both visible in urban space. Prague’s unfinished transformation exacerbated the disappointed expectations of reward for war sacrifices and new life in the republic. Social uncertainty prevailed in the postwar city in an atmosphere of diffuse revolutionary spirit. The discourse of revolution, very present at the time, could refer to either the rupture of 1918 or the changes yet to come. Popular interpretations of revolution at the local level shed new light on 1918 as a turning point in twentieth-century Europe beyond its traditional interpretation as either an aftershock of the Bolshevik revolution or a victory of national self-determination.

Feeling marginalized, silenced and excluded, as an individual or as a (sub)group within a collective, can make one feel uncertain about one’s self and identity and about “fitting in.” This feeling of uncertainty can be reduced by group identification – especially with a distinctive group that has a clearly defined, unambiguous, and homogenous social identity. Such groups and identities can sometimes be characterized as extremist. Excluded individuals may exit the larger group to identify with a different and possibly more extreme group, and the larger group may thus become less diverse and more homogeneous and extreme itself. Members of excluded subgroups can bond tightly together as a highly distinctive entity and identify strongly with it, a process that can fragment and polarize the larger group into oppositional or combative factions. In this chapter we draw upon an uncertainty identity theory framework to describe how exclusion can generate self and identity uncertainty, which is resolved by a process of identification that fragments groups and can produce extremist groups and identities.

This chapter discusses the difference between arbitrage and innovation, the unpredictability of innovation, and the four uncertainties: technological feasibility uncertainty, commercial value uncertainty, related technology uncertainty, and uncertainty brought about by politics, culture, and policies. The uncertainties of innovation means there cannot be a unified plan for innovation. Instead, innovation relies on the special skills and expertise of entrepreneurs. Innovation can only come from decentralized decisions, with each entrepreneur making his own judgment and the market determining the winner and loser. The market itself is an error correction mechanism. It can encourage the most creative and ambitious people to create wealth for society, but also guarantees that these people (entrepreneurs) do not bring about fatal disasters.

The first chapter primarily discusses entrepreneurship from the perspective of F.A. Hayek’s theories of knowledge, holding that indescribable “soft knowledge” is the most critical to entrepreneurs. Without understanding the importance of soft knowledge, it is impossible to understand entrepreneurship. Using the case of how F. Tudor, the American entrepreneur, created a mass market for ice, the author emphasizes the four points of entrepreneurship: alertness to profitable opportunities, imagination of the future, simplification of complexity, and perseverance and patience.

This chapter uses three classic examples to explain what entrepreneurship is NOT. Entrepreneurial decisions are different from managerial decisions, and cannot be understood within the neoclassical rational model. First, entrepreneurial decision-making is not scientific decision making, which is based on data and calculations, instead, it mainly depends on intuition, imagination, and judgement. Second, entrepreneurial decision-making is not about finding a solution under given constraints, instead it changes constraints. Third, entrepreneurial decision making is not solely profit focused, the entrepreneur has non-profit goals. Imagination is the most important for entrepreneurial decisions under an uncertain and indeterminate future. This means that mainstream economics’ externality theory, anti-monopoly theory, and corporate governance theory must all be revised. This also means industrial policy has lost its theoretical basis. This chapter is the core of the entire manuscript. It is extremely important for our understanding of the market economy.

The times in between significant medical events allow for different conversations with patients about living with uncertainty, the effects of their disease and its treatment, the fear of the next crisis, or figuring out who they are now and what they might hope for their future. Sometimes worry about becoming more ill or dying shows up in conversations in disguise, like being fixated on a particular test that a clinician might consider medically less important or even unnecessary. Sometimes completing cancer therapy brings a mix of emotion, relief that it is done and worry that it may not really be. Other times patients who have recovered from an exacerbation, like in heart failure, realize how much they have changed due to the disease and its treatment, and while glad they survived are simultaneously unhappy about how their life has changed. The roadmap for clinicians in these more calm but uncertain times is to ask your patient’s perspective, respond to their emotion (often exploring to create a deeper understanding), and offer your clinical experience of other patients which might apply to help clarify the issues at hand, provide different perspective, and offer support.

The Coda sketches how the distinctive tradition of uncertainty in nineteenth-century literature and culture changes with the rise of literary modernism. Uncertainty remains of vital interest to writers like Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. Yet a more self-conscious embrace of chance, contingency, and randomness, alongside a more thoroughgoing skepticism, disengages this writing from the earlier literature’s concerns. Further valences acquired by the concept of uncertainty in the early twentieth century – as radical indeterminacy in physics and contrast class to risk in economics – both intensify cultural interest in the topic and disarticulate its nineteenth-century framework. In a reading of Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1914), I argue that his emphasis on the value of momentary judgments, on knowledge as mercurial and provisional, and on the role of accident in literary plots all reprise Victorian tactics.