Insurance and me and us (part 2 of something)

Insurance seems like the last thing anyone with imagination would talk about.  The very definition of bloodless bureaucracy, mundane minutiae.  It's also been part of my family history.  My grandfather was a "life insurance man"--an executive at a small company in Nebraska, with the letters CLU after his name, a lot of his identity drawn from the role and experiences he had with that company. My father-in-law was an accomplished and successful actuary, and his work experience lent weight and wisdom to his progressive convictions. In my role as a consultant and administrator, insurance and actuarial science come up pretty regularly.  We don't always think about insurance, and part of its significance is that you want to know insurance is in place and then not think about it. You want to know that it is a solid part of the infrastructure of experience, taken for granted, invisible. 

It came as a surprise then to see insurance enter into the discussion of governmentality, which seems to be the primary intellectual framework for Foucault's huge influence on organization and administration theory. Foucault saw a society as being controlled by a "triangle" of sovereignty, disciplinarity and government, with government understood as the general exercise of control--government of one's self, government of children in education, the government of souls and lives by children, and the government of a population by the sovereign. Governmentality is the set of methods in place for managing a population and the bodies of knowledge seen as necessary to do that.  It is different from government, because it is not limited to specific organization or legal structures, but it a broader web of control techniques and a set of assumptions underlying most aspects of a period's social life.   

Risk is one of modern society's key knowledge bases, and insurance is the technical method of managing risk. 

Risk emerges as an issue because modern society, with its loosening of traditional bonds of connection and social cohesion combined with technological advances unleashed new levels of peril and uncertainty. This phenomenon is at the base of Marcuse's passion, where he laments the irrationality of a technologically advanced society where those technological advances seem to have been oriented to delivering destruction and threats to existence at an unprecedented scale. This is the irrationality he sees as the end of rationality.   

Insurance emerged in the late 19th century in a society roiled by social, political, economic, and technological change.  Some of the writing that people draw on is from French scholars who address this is in a French context, such as the institution of social insurance established by the government of Napoleon III, which offered an alternative to more mutualist approaches that were emerging from a radicalized working class.  The context though was common to the industrialized world--a society reorganized into wage-dependent urban communities where people worked in mechanized environments with huge potential for injury and penury. Insurance programs were a way to compensate for that risk.  You might lose your ability to provide economic viability for your family, but we will set up a program where you will be provided compensation if that does happen.  At a different time, an injured person might expect support from a family with a more diverse household economy--some food from a garden plot, some household industry--or from their commune.   In the 19th century, it was possible that the workers themselves would make these provisions for themselves, but that would create a power center that would challenge other parts of society for legitimacy and authority. Instead, the state stepped in, 

A surprising extent of American life s governed by insurance of one sort or another.  We don't have a pension system--Social Security is an insurance plan, where you pay in for a time, with the promise of a payout/payback later based on what you put in and expectations about life expectancy--i.e., actuarial science.  In case of injury, you are covered by Workers Compensation Insurance--your employer either carries this insurance or pays into a state program.  You can barely have a place to live without out it--to buy a house, you have to have insurance covering the value of your home, some mortgages require insurance to cover repayment, and some landlords require renter's insurance.  You can't drive without insurance. And rather than a national health plan, we have health insurance.  We've created a healthcare system that will hit you with punitive charges if you use it, and your insurance is your protection against the threat that the healthcare system constitutes. Insurance is on offer for lost cell phones, defective products, flight cancellations and so on. Anything can be translated into an insurance contract.

Insurance does a bunch of interesting things from a theoretical perspective.  It has the effect of taking shared risks and converting them into individual, atomized transactions.  For instance, flood insurance takes the risk of a natural disaster, which would be shared by everyone sharing a geography, divides up the risk into parts that can be sold as individual transactions, thereby providing an individualistic way of responding to a shared threat. 

It also does create a kind of solidarity, but it is of an abstract nature unlike traditional solidarities such as family or community.  You replace what could be active forms of solidarity--say of union members contributing to mutual funds, or a community caring for the people it knows as its members--with one that is nothing other than a risk pool defined by a group of hidden technocrats.

It converts human life into a form of capital.  Life insurance is designed to recover the lost earnings/value of the life, and it encourages individuals and families to look at lives as a form of private capital stock.  Turning a life into capital makes them equivalent. Exchange value over use value. Economics over ethics. 

It converts social relations and actions into calculations, expressed in the common denomination of dollars. It implicitly makes the case that anything can be measured and financialized. 

Insurance is an extremely effective tool for training people to understand relationships is society as agonistic. An insurance policy is an alternative to a lawsuit.  

The insistence in the US on providing access to health care through insurance has an almost mind-boggling effect.  It means that for most of us, medicine is not cast in terms of health, but in terms of risk.  The point about medicine is that you have to protect yourself from it, because if you encounter it naked (without insurance coverage), it will destroy you financially.  The threat of a medical malpractice suit is the primary vehicle we depend on to provide an incentive for good care, and I'm sure hospital administrators if not providers treat each patient as a potential litigant.

The role of insurance means that relationships are defined in terms of their potential for conflict--the operating assumption that conflict is always just around the corner. Cooperation has no weight. 

One of Foucault's key arguments is that these structures get worked into the fabric of experience. They become common senses.  They become invisible. A historically specific invisible hand. 

    

Dean, Mitchell. (1999)   Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. Sage.

Defert, Daniel (1991)  "'Popular Life' and Insurance Technology" in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.  Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds.  University of Chicago

Ewald, Francois (1991)  "Insurance and Risk" in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.  Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds.  University of Chicago

Foucault, Michel (1991)  "Governmentality" in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality.  Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds.  University of Chicago.

Marcuse, Herbert (1964). One-Dimensional Man.  Beacon.