Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility

by Tom Baker, Jonathan Simon

Overview

For much of the twentieth century, industrialized nations addressed social problems, such as workers' compensation benefits and social welfare programs, in terms of spreading risk. But in recent years a new approach has emerged: using risk both as a way to conceive of and address social problems and as an incentive to reduce individual claims on collective resources.

Embracing Risk explores this new approach from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second part examines how risk is used to govern fields outside the realm of insurance, from extreme sports to policing, mental health institutions, and international law. Offering an original approach to risk, insurance, and responsibility, the provocative and wide-ranging essays in Embracing Risk demonstrate that risk has moved well beyond its origins in the insurance trade to become a central organizing principle of social and cultural life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226035192
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/15/2002
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America Ser.
Edition description:	1
Pages:	329
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Tom Baker is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of The Medical Malpractice Myth, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Jonathan Simon is Associate Dean of Jurisprudence and Social Policy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Poor Discioline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
1. Embracing Risk
Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon
Part One: Toward a Sociology of Insurance and Risk
2 Risk, Insurance, and the Social Construction of Responsibility
Tom Baker
3 Beyond Moral Hazard: Insurance as Moral Opportunity
Deborah Stone
4 Embracing Fatality through Life Insurance in Eighteenth-Century England
Geoffrey Clark
5 Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thrift, and Life Insurance in Britain
Pat O'Malley
6 Insuring More, Ensuring Less: The Costs and Benefits of Private Regulation through Insurance
Carol A. Heimer
7 Rhetoric of Risk and the Redistribution of Social Insurance
Martha McCluskey
Part Two: Risk(s) beyond Insurance
8 Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies
Jonathan Simon
9 At Risk of Madness
Nikolas Rose
10 The Policing of Risk
Richard V. Ericson and Kevin D. Haggerty
11 The Return of Descartes's Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution
Francois Ewald (translated by Stephen Utz)
Index