Been reading Foucault's lectures from 1979. I'm in a section where he carefully goes through the characteristics of the neo-liberal regime of governmentality, in particular the German form of this or Ordo liberalism. To summarize a couple of key concepts, the principles of a market economy and competition form the principle of government, whose purpose in the German system is to intervene to uphold the conditions for pure competition. The social policy of this order is to extend the principle of the enterprise throughout society, and all members of society consider themselves enterprises and direct their energies towards building the assets that allow them to control risks through mechanisms such as insurance.
Insurance is a surprisingly central element in neo-liberal governmentality as described by Foucault and his followers. I certainly have found it to be a surprisingly strong force, as you can see in some of my earlier posts. Insurance is used as the model for providing essential services such as health care, income in retirement. When you think about it for a minute, it is a weird model. In essence, you make a bet with another party--they bet you won't get sick or wreak your car, or you bet that the stock market will do better than inflation.
You can buy insurance on almost any contingency. Responsible individuals, families, organizations, and companies get insurance. Being fully insured is an aspect of being well-governed.
What happens then when you hear stories that insurance is no longer available? Maybe you can't buy policies to protect your property in Florida. Health insurance carriers dwindle in some places. Do these market failures represent an unraveling of the neo-liberal order. It is based on individualizing rather than socializing benefits and risks. If we are seeing an increase in places where insurance markets no longer operate, it seems to me that we might be entering a post-neoliberal stage. It might not be a very good stage. It could be one in which there is no individual escape from disaster, but also no socialization of risk and benefit.
I don't know if the cases add up to a trend, but won't the early stages look like some possibly isolated anomalies? Or perhaps one can use the case study of specific failures in insurance markets to understand what this post-neoliberal phase might look like.
