To better account for deepening global inequalities, political theory could greatly enhance empirical and normative work by answering a fundamental question: What is profit? When engaging political‐economic questions, however, theorists often begin thinking from the concept of private property. This, I argue, has obscured the central role of profit as an organizing category for capitalist societies since the eighteenth century. Grounded in the dynamic and uncertain processes of production and accumulation, profit displaces the proprietary citizen and subject of natural rights and gives rise to new social protagonists, who lay claim to increasingly asymmetric rewards. In particular, the article calls attention to a dangerous contemporary sensibility, which sees profit as inherently unlimited. As a viable, robust alternative, it presents Adam Smith's idea of profit as a regular, uniform rate that acts as a productive constraint on business activity, shapes character, and safeguards against risk by widely distributing its costs.
The article examines the early reception of Knight’s and Keynes’ accounts of uncertainty and their overlooked role in the development of financial economics. Knight’s famous distinction between risk and uncertainty bore a deep social and political significance, dividing humanity into risk-takers and the risk-averse. This same distinction, I argue, along with its asymmetries of power and rewards, was reproduced in Hicks’ 1939 dynamic equilibrium model. It was recast as an opposition between hedgers and speculators in a market for risk, on the one hand, and between institutional investors and the general public, on the other. Hicks’s synthesis heeds both Knightian and Keynesian notions of uncertainty, adopting the former’s idea of profit-earning uncertainty-bearers and the latter’s definition of money as an imperfect though widely used hedge against uncertainty. Closer to Knight than to Keynes, Hicks’s model raises a fundamental political question: is inequality a price worth paying for greater certainty in economic life?
The article asks why and how Hannah Arendt framed The Human Condition as a history of modern science. It answers that, in telling the history of instrumental rationality and the work of the experimental scientist, Arendt accomplished three main things. First, by identifying science as a form of ‘work’ she could demonstrate the significance of her threefold division of human activity into labour, work and action, highlighting the dangers of their indistinction. Second, Arendt used the form of organization typical of scientists – a professional community founded on standards of objectivity – to warn against the substitution of the appearance of publicity for true openness. Finally, she identified the transgression of the boundaries of action as the site where a political community might become visible to itself, taking the unsuccessful attempts of post-war ‘public scientists’ to reckon with their past as a cautionary tale. Her account of modern science thus allows her to define freedom through its dependence on human-made boundaries, politicizing the very act of history-writing.
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