The Values of Insurance

Abstract

The history of insurance tells the story of modern morality, more precisely of modern struggles within the sphere of morality. Thus it would be incorrect to assume that insurance was borne of only a hypothetical need for security. The writings of Jean Halpérin have clearly shown that, for insurance to exist, a new need for security had to appear. Insurance is the offspring of capital. This new form of security was not needed in a feudal economy, in which property was tied to the land, and the individual was enclosed within the bonds of family and religion, or within corporate solidarity. Security becomes necessary, however, as soon as financial assets begin to circulate, become tradable, and capital finds itself exposed to the dangers engendered by this circulation. It is no coincidence that the first kind of insurance was maritime: “The sea alone was able to elude rigid feudal armature. The cornerstone of the feudal world was essentially the land; the sea escapes social and political hierarchies; it is not subject to any governmental authority whatsoever. Nothing is less feudal than the sea.”1 Insurance as a method for securing capital also was born as a means to circumvent the church’s prohibition against usury. “Insurance was born from the simultaneous struggle against maritime insecurity and against canon laws with regard to finance.” Also, as noted by Halpérin, the origin of insurance is not to be found in the older forms of “common security” [sécurité solidaire]; “When insurance appeared for the first time as an autonomous social institution, it was not founded on a sense of solidarity, but rather in the spirit of financial gain.”2 The spread of insurance goes hand in hand with the dismantling of feudal solidarity and the freeing and autonomy of the individual. Insurance is a security measure linked to individualism. It is the offspring of a capitalist ethos that has been well described by writers such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber. Neither of these authors explicitly took up the theme of insurance in their writing. But texts such as The Quintessence of Capitalism and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism give the historical background that allows us to understand the moral context in which insurance was called into play.3 When Sombart describes the origin of an entrepreneurial spirit in practices such as speculation and project development [fabrique de projets], we are right to wonder whether “the insurance business” is a pleonasm. When Max Weber describes capitalist rationality, arguing that the spirit of capitalism is characterized by the fact that this rationality became a form of morality, we wonder what better example there could be than insurance. The creation of life insurance in the eighteenth