Insuring Life

Written for researchers in the field, this scholarly work examines how risk and uncertainty are used to govern populations, using life insurance as its case study. It asks what kind of governance insurance produces and how that governance relates to the possibility of moving beyond liberalism.

The author separates capable life, which insurance can take hold of as an object, from potential life, which slips past that control. Through a historical and epistemological inquiry, the book looks at how valuation, the production of truth, securitisation, classification and gender shape life insurance products and the practices around them. A critical reading of the epistemology behind these instruments shows that the conditions allowing them to operate as tools of liberal rule are both unnecessary and fragile.

The argument concludes that getting past liberalism depends on the technological agency of such instruments, and that this challenge starts by rethinking how the potential of life, which the author regards as beyond price, can be understood as an event. The book is the third in a trilogy and follows Insuring War. It is aimed at scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in political economy, critical security studies, political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics.