Insurance, Equality and the Welfare State: Political Philosophy and (of) Public Insurance

Abstract

Public insurance is both everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere in the sense that it is omnipresent in industrialised societies: public health insurance, unemployment benefits and pensions. It is a sizeable part of modern nations’ public budget (for many nations like the United States and France about half of it). It has permeated our understanding of societal institutions to the extent that now access to public insurance coverage is understood as being a struggle for equality and equal citizenship (Stone 1999–2000). Public insurance is only one aspect of a broader phenomenon: the transformation of modern societies into insurance societies, i.e. societies that are orientated toward risk-management (Beck 1992; Ericson and Doyle 2003). Nevertheless, public insurance is at the core of the welfare state as insurance system. Paul Krugman once said of the modern state that it is ‘an insurance company with an army’ while David Moss (2002) argues that government is the ultimate risk manager (e.g. money emission, banking system, workers protection, disaster relief, and so forth). At the same time, public insurance is almost nowhere in political philosophy and normative theory (although exceptions include Anderson, Forthcoming; Baker and Moss 2009; Dworkin 2002; Ewald 1996; Heath 2011; Lehtonen and Jyri 2011). Hence, public insurance has attracted little overall interest from political philosophers, especially when compared to redistribution, equality and theories of justice. The present special issue of Res Publica entitled Insurance, Equality and the Welfare State addresses this lack. It is a contribution to an emerging field that might