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Jonathan Levy , Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America , Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2012. Pp. 432. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-674-04748-8 ).
Book Reviews
Jonathan Levy's brilliant, prize-winning book Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America, reconstructs the nineteenth century world in which, what he calls, "the economic chance world" of capitalism took hold. As Levy argues, risk was paired with/fundamental to capitalism's development. The word "risk" is all too often read as synonymous with hazard, peril, or danger. Two things, at least, are lost in such a reading. First, is that of the potential upside of future uncertainty: in the emerging world of capitalism, risk-taking held out the promise of unparalleled gains as much as devastating losses. And second, is that risk began its life as a financial instrument for coping with the uncertainties ("the perils of the seas") of long-distance maritime trade. Risks were then themselves commodities that could be and were bought and sold independent of the underlying commodity (rice, lumber, slaves) to which they related; they made the maritime trade that underlay the modern birth of capitalism possible.
As Levy explains, nineteenth century Americans faced the new insecurities of capitalism and embraced the language and financial instruments of risk in the same context that they grappled with the "moral struggle over freedom and slavery" (5). And so it was that owning one's own risks became seen as a fundamental characteristic of self-ownership: the free man owned his own risks; the slave or the married woman did not. Self-ownership was then in its origins, in this particular as in so many others, both racialized and gendered. The moral conundrum posed by...