Speculation - by Gayle Rogers (Paperback)

About the Book

In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces the debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create--and potentially destroy--the future.

Book Synopsis

In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations--from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles--often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?

In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity's mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution's new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.

Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create--and potentially destroy--the future.

Review Quotes

Thanks to the technological revolution, humans have a mass of tools that can aid them in speculating about the future. Yet we continue to make spectacularly bad predictions about events that are only a few days or weeks away. Simultaneously, the modern "risk society," as Rogers deems it, has dramatically expanded the risks of poor speculation from our political and thought leaders. In retelling the history, psychology, and neurological mysticism of speculation, Rogers offers an enticing remedy to challenges in an engaging read. Speculation will change the way you think.--G. Elliott Morris, data journalist and author

Speculation takes readers on a fascinating tour across time, disciplines, genres, cultures, languages, and domains. Rogers shows how people have struggled to bound and describe uncertainties in themselves and their world, sometimes declaring victory over themselves and others, sometimes agonizing or reveling in defeat. It bears more than one great.--Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Heinz University Professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

Like the finest lens makers, Rogers has reflected, refracted, magnified and generally brought into focus two millennia of thought and culture, all around the perfectly tempered curvature of a single term. Speculation, I suspect, will stand on the ridge of contemporary critical inquiry like a specula, a watchtower, for years to come.--Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island: A Novel

Gayle Rogers' Speculation begins as a definition but soon becomes a sweeping cultural history. As the story develops, this apparently simple term expands to take in all sorts of mixed feelings about the practical and the ideal, the present and the future, the tangible and the intangible. The human tendency to look ahead is shown to be the source of our highest flights of fancy and our most devious schemes. Right now, when the uncertainty of the future sharpens our desire to imagine it, this account of the ins and outs, the highs and lows, of speculation is especially welcome.--Michael North, author of What Is the Present?

Speculation is at once an erudite study of the long history of a single term and a timely, entertaining read about the way words can reshape the relationship between ideas.--Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Common Sense: A Political History

About the Author

Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature (Columbia, 2016) and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (2012).