ABSTRACT
The rise of neoclassical economics after the marginal revolution of 1871 established homo economicus—economic man—as largely risk averse, trading risks for commensurate rewards in the most rational and utilitarian ways. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, homo economicus’s allegedly individual choices about costs and benefits, risks and rewards, depended more than ever on a massive apparatus of risk administration and on knowledge generated by risk experts. By rereading Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in relation to Frank Knight’s theory of risk and uncertainty, this essay argues that the rise of risk administration impelled many people to defend their status as liberal individuals not by rationally mitigating risks, but by embracing them. Under the assumption that recklessness constitutes a more immediate and purely private affair, risk became its own reward. Through Crystal Eastman’s accounts of reckless railroad workers in her early sociological survey Work Accidents and the Law, and through a consideration of Google executive Alan Eustace’s leap from a balloon at the edge of space, this essay traces the rise of the hazardous individual as an inversion of homo economicus, but one no less dedicated to neoclassical economic ideals.
