 The scientific spirit that Hume and Smith brought to their economics was already present a century earlier; both Hobbes and Petty voiced the aspiration of rendering morals into a quantitative discourse. “Commercial mathematics” took hold during the first half of the seventeenth century and many of the formal methods that have become commonplace in postwar economics were first adopted in the early modern period (see Redman 1997; Sylla 2003). Blaise Pascal’s wager to believe in God (1670 [1910]) and Daniel Bernoulli’s Saint Petersburg paradox (1738 [1954]) are preliminary examples of decision theory (see Hutchison 1988). Both imposed probability measures on expected utilities and thus provided the scaffolding of what has become an important line of inquiry in mainstream economics. Pierre de Fermat (1654) [1962] and Christiaan Huygens (1657) also studied games of chance (see Klein 1997). Game theoretical modes of thinking permeated the works of Hobbes and Hume (see Hampton 1986; Kavka 1986; Hardin 2007). Hume also articulated core elements of decision theory, including the idea of time discounting (see Diaye &amp; Lapidus 2019; Sugden 2021).