ABSTRACT
Uncertainty is a fundamental condition of human life. We try to master it by discovering the regularities in events which enable us to predict and control them. When they do not turn out as we expected, we look for ways to revise our understanding, our purposes and means of control. When we cannot foretell what will happen, we try to keep our choices of action open; and when none of those choices seems hopeful, we try to withdraw into familiar certainties or fall into despair. The management of uncertainty is therefore a very individual endeavour, because each of us learns in our own way, through our unique experience, to find patterns of events, and develops our own strategies of control and avoidance. But it is equally a quality of society, since each evolves its own forms of understanding the world and regulating human behaviour, and distributes both the power to control relationships and freedom of action unevenly between its members. In this book, I make the argument that because the power to control uncertainty is very unequally distributed, the greatest burden of uncertainties tends to fall on the weakest, with the fewest resources to withstand it, and in trying to retrieve some sense of autonomy and control they often compound and confirm their weakness. I want to suggest a way of thinking about power which emphasizes control over contingencies rather than control over resources-the ability to manoeuvre in the face of uncertainties, often at the expense of others whose power is less. But to understand how this comes about, we need first to look more generally at the way each of us tries to create a viable sense of our own agency in a manageably predictable world.
