Insuring Life

Life insurance is generally accepted to be part of an apparatus of security aimed at securing the everyday life of populations in advanced liberal economies. What is ultimately protected by insurance instruments are the livelihoods and lifestyles of individuals who purchase securities (policies) to protect themselves against life events such as illness and death. Insurers employ the revenue from policies as investment capital which must provide a return to compensate for future claims, but also to generate value to their stockholders. Insurers have traditionally been protected by reinsurers who in turn have had some form of protection by sovereign authorities.

The last decades, however, have witnessed a dynamic transformation in the operation of traditional life insurance schemes. As a result of the development of novel underwriting and actuarial techniques, as well as developments in the regulatory environments and court rulings, insurers have pioneered into new forms of ascribing value to life. These entail epistemological changes as a result of advances in science and the logics of classification, but also financial manoeuvres in the capital markets. Rendering the uncertainties of livelihoods and lifestyles as risks for which a form of security could be bought, insurers are actively finding ways of extracting value from life as security for clients but also as investment capital.

This volume is intended as a provocation for thinking liberal life as the result of three mutually implicated problems: value – security – risk. Their strategic interaction is observed here as materialised in life insurance, which is understood as constituting a political economy of security. It provides new analysis and interpretation of the importance of and historical (juridical) contestations surrounding, life insurance as a practice of governing. It situates life insurance in the context of everyday practices of security under liberalism, and analyses the way in which radically uncertain futures are domesticated and made profitable.

The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero is Professor at Groningen University, The Netherlands.