Calculations of risk: Towards an understanding of insurance as a moral and political technology
This paper is a contribution to the continuing examination of the linkages and interdependencies between politics and forms of calculation. It uses the case of life insurance in England to argue that the constitution of risk as the object of insurance is linked to a series of important transformations in the aims and means of the liberal government of the “social” domain. Insurance and its associated calculative techniques have been constituted as moral and political technologies and relied upon by a succession of governmental-administrative projects of social regulation culminating in, but not exhausted by, the construction of a state-sponsored “insurantial” apparatus.