The new risk culture had philosophical and scientific underpinnings. The discovery of the calculus, of a way of measuring probabilities, was accompanied by a gambling boom and the introduction in Great Britain (it remained banned almost everywhere else) of life insurance. John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, which rooted all knowledge in sense perceptions of the natural world, opened up the market in ideas. Truths took on the appearance of mere opinions. Increased knowledge of worlds beyond Europe, with their own systems of belief, gave sustenance to the argument that religion had an anthropological base. Where, then, were the certainties of the Christian faith? What, at any rate, was the force of that faith when Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica, which brought two centuries of cosmology to a culminating point, implied that God, circumscribed by his own laws that governed the universe, was a limited, constitutional monarch incapable of intervening in history?
As in the world of ideas, so in politics. Throughout the 17th century Great Britain had been subject to the turbulence and bloodshed of a mighty quarrel to decide which were the right forms of government in Church and State. By 1700 the answer was clear: none. The new political world was to be ‘a place of alternatives and choices’ in which political differences did not have to end in recourse to arms. Whig and Tory, Anglican and Dissenter ‘would co-exist — to everyone’s surprise — in a state of permanent, dynamic equilibrium’. A changed mentality was emerging. In this book its map has been entertainingly drawn.
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