The chapter begins by looking at Beck’s theory of a Risk Society and how this has denied that risk is a term that can be applied to the ancient world. There is a survey of relevant work that has been carried out on uncertainty in antiquity, before the chapter examines how the term risk emerged and the various ways of defining the term. The chapter argues for a broader, cultural approach that sees risk as more than a modern numerical concept and the development of ideas concerning risk as a historical process.

This chapter examines areas of knowledge where the Romans displayed expertise and consciously sought to develop techniques and systems that enabled them to better understand and control future uncertainties. It begins by looking at architecture, military logistics and law, before moving on to aspects of financial management, such as maritime loans, interest rates and annuities; it then finishes by looking at the probabilistic thinking involved in the religious practices of oracle and dream interpretation. It argues that the ancients did not rely solely on religion to deal with uncertainty. The Romans thought systematically and creatively about many areas where future uncertainty could be assessed and managed. These approaches were not statistical but all show an awareness of a range of likelihoods and possibilities. The Romans did not have statistical models, nor had they worked out how to calculate probabilities, but they did develop a range of sophisticated ways of dealing with the many unknowns they faced.

The conclusion compares Roman ideas about risk with their ideas about the future. It argues that they displayed a mixture of both basic and relatively sophisticated understanding. The areas where the greatest development can be found – in the military, financial and legal spheres – reflect a militaristic, legalistic and strongly hierarchical society where what mattered most were keeping control of great areas of territory, maintaining the social order that controlled the population and upholding the property rights of the few. There was no perceived need to develop the notion of risk outside of these areas.

Fears do not simply reflect the reality of the underlying dangers. Fear is itself created by society’s debates about what count as risks and how these should be managed. Beck has argued that modernity’s uncertainties have arisen from technological developments themselves, in that these have generated self-destructive threats that they are incapable of controlling. This chapter argues that Rome’s social structure generated its own specific set of anxieties. Just as technology has today created anxieties about the downside of that innovation, in Rome, empire generated a set of fears concerning its perceived negative side-effects. These were focused on moral issues, and their anxieties were expressed in areas where they had their own expertise, in particular the law and rhetoric. Their fears were also often constructed in a backward-looking way, seeking to reduce future risk by returning to the traditions of the past.

The Romans had to cope with uncertainty and, in part, did so through a shared set of knowledge and practices, which this chapter calls a risk culture. These ways of coping contained a lower level of individuality, consciousness or reflexivity than Beck’s modern Risk Society. There was also no simple divide between lay and expert knowledge. The Roman world exposed its inhabitants to a variety of risks but the accumulated experience of coping with these represented a mutual way of mitigating the dangers.

Modern theorists have seen the development of the concept of risk as reflecting a profound shift away from a belief in the divine determination of human fate. Modernity, it is also argued, has seen the introduction of new mega-risks, which are far larger than those before. The chapter challenges these views and argues both that the Romans were not simply fatalistic about the future, and also that it is impossible to quantify whether the ancients faced less risk.

The epilogue reflects on the nature of essay collections and the distinctive contribution they make to intellectual debate and to wider society. It considers the risks we take when we make and accept academic arguments, and explores some of the specific questions these essays raise for the contemporary world.

To develop a scientific perspective on intuition, we first need to dispense with the old and misleading dualistic opposition of intuition and reason. Rather, intuition and reason go hand in hand: where a doctor feels that something is wrong with a patient, intuition comes first, followed by a deliberate search for what is wrong. Even abstract disciplines like mathematics, need both intuition and reasoning. As George Pólya emphasized, finding a problem or discovering a proof requires intuition and heuristics; checking whether the proof is correct requires logic and analysis. The theoretical framework to understand the nature of intuition is that of ecological rationality, the study of how mental processes are adapted to their environments, based on Herbert Simon’s notion of bounded rationality, i.e., how people make decisions under uncertainty – where the best action cannot be calculated. Good intuitions rely on adaptive heuristics that are not logically, but ecologically, rational. The fluency heuristic, the recognition heuristic, and satisficing exemplify tools of the adaptive toolbox. Under uncertainty, they can lead to better decisions than complex algorithms.

This chapter shows how successive UK governments have applied a first-best-world neoclassical approach to climate policy: one that understands risk as something that can be calculated, modelled, and integrated within market mechanisms by essentially rational market actors. This was not just the economics that gave us the Global Financial Crisis, the chapter shows that the underlying Rational Expectations and Efficient Markets hypotheses are the market analogues to Soviet theories of optimal planning, and built on the same ontological and epistemological fallacies. The chapter explores how dependence on closed-system reasoning condemns government to ‘write out’ the uncertain dynamics of the climate emergency and the precautionary principle that should follow. The empirical section shows how successive governments of New Left and New Right have implemented regulatory and market-making policies built on the assumption that market agents not only can but will behave rationally in the face of future risk. They have also relied on carbon budgeting, forecasting and audit as dependable methods of risk management, though such methodologies are only coherent in a closed-system world.

This chapter delves deeper into the process by which artists make their creations available to purchasers. We will also focus on why these purchasers decide to acquire art. Ultimately, these decisions constitute the supply of and demand for art, which eventually helps explain both the levels of art prices and the changes in those levels. We describe the market for paintings that consists of both primary and secondary markets. Finally, we describe the concepts of expected return and risk and how to evaluate whether art is a good investment.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

Gambling in this period was never just about gambling; it always represented something else or spoke to some bigger set of concerns. It was thought to be a neutered form of aggression, made socially acceptable through the relentless power of the civilizing process but flowering in the novel context of the resort casino. Gambling was a way to connect to prior forms of existence, and it functioned as a substitute for socially unacceptable practices. Gambling is also contrasted with other forms of risk: insurance and speculation. Some observers took a pro-gambling approach, noting the unique skills it cultivates or its basis in nature.