With every ship that is launched, capital begins the movement that characterizes the spatial ‘revolution’ of the Modern Age: the circuiting of the earth by the money employed, and its successful return to its starting account. Return of investment – this is the movement of movements that all acts of risk-taking obey. It lends all operations of capital, even those that do not cross the open sea, a nautical aspect, as every sum invested multiplies itself through a metamorphosis from the commodity form to the monetary form and back – from the booking form to the travel form, one could also say. As a commodity, money plunges into the open sea of the markets, and, like the ships, must hope for a happy return to its home port, the owner's account; the circumnavigation of the globe is implicitly envisaged in the commodity metamorphosis. It becomes explicit when the goods for which the money is exchanged have to be sought on the distant markets, in the chemist's shops of the Orient.
The return of floating capital from its long-distance journey turns the madness of expansion into the reason of profit. The fleet of Columbus and his successors comprises ships of fools that are converted into ships of reason. The most reasonable ship is the one that returns most reliably – saved up by a new Fortuna Redux for regular, happy journeys home.1 And because the money invested in speculative undertakings is expected to bring the investor a substantial gain, the true name for such yields is ‘revenues’ – returns of itinerant monies whose multiplication constitutes the premium for the investors’ property, which is burdened with changes of form and nautical risks.2
As far as the reasonable-insane overseas merchants in the ports is concerned – all these new risk-nationalists: the Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, English, Dutch, French and Germans who hoisted their flags on the oceans – they had learned by 1600 at the latest how to make their risks calculable through diversification. The new insurances seemed suitable to outwit the sea and its cliffs economically. Humans and property can be in what one calls danger; ‘a commodity at sea’ (Condorcet), on the other hand, is subject to a risk, that is to say a mathematically describable probability of failure, and calculating solidary communities can be formed to combat this probability. Here the risk society comes about as the alliance of well-insured profit-seekers. It unifies the insane who have thought everything through beforehand.
In business undertakings, unlike in everlasting philosophy, someone who bets everything on one outcome is a fool. The wise man thinks far ahead and relies, like every bourgeois who can count, on diversification. One can entirely understand how Antonio, Shakespeare's merchant of Venice, could explain so convincingly why his sadness did not come from his enterprises:
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year;
Therefore, my merchandise makes me not sad.3
Antonio's merchant intelligence mirrors the average wisdom of an age in which floating capital had already spent a while thinking about the art of reducing risks to a reasonably acceptable level. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of the European insurance system, for example its mathematical foundations, extend back to the early seventeenth century.4 The blooming of the insurance idea in the middle of the first adventure period of globalized seafaring shows that the great risk-takers were willing to pay a price in order to be taken seriously as reasonable subjects. For them, everything depended on establishing a sufficiently deep divide between themselves and ordinary madmen. Such insurance systems as Modern Age philosophy drew their justifications from the imperative to separate reason and madness clearly and unambiguously. Their kinship therefore extends deeper than the history of ideas has thus far been able to show. Both deal with techniques for security and certainty; both are interested in controlling fluctuating processes (flows of commodities and money, states of consciousness and streams of signs), and hence synonymous with the disciplinary systems of the absolutistic and bourgeois ‘society’ examined by Michel Foucault in his histories of order.