Robert Kaminski is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton Center. He has previously taught courses in economics, history, and political theory at the University of Chicago, Drew University, and the University of Georgia. Kaminski’s research embraces an interdisciplinary approach to explore the evolving relationship between business, labor, and the American state.

Kaminski is currently working on his first book, Managers of Uncertainty: Labor, the Limits of Insurability, and America’s Corporate Consolidation, 1885–1921. It examines how business leaders, academics, and journalists grappled with the limits of insurability even as financial risk management emerged as a defining feature of modern capitalism. It shows manufacturers like the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and brewers like Val Blatz embracing other strategies to manage their exposure to unquantifiable, uninsurable uncertainties about market demand and labor relations—where the complex causality of human action limited insurability. Though these strategies did not always succeed, their legacies would include the International Harvester merger, IH’s subsequent experiments in welfare capitalism, and the closed-shop corporatism that arrived in Milwaukee breweries decades before the New Deal. Beyond highlighting underappreciated connections between business and labor history, this project thus raises questions about the limits of technocratic expertise in our uncertain world.