INSURANCE, RISK AND THE LIMITS OF SENTIMENTAL REPRESENTATION

Abstract

The financial crisis that began in late 2008 and the centrality of corporate entities such as AIG and instruments such as the credit default swap exposes the extent to which the economy depends on systems that we can broadly define as ‘insurance’. But the brief prominence of insurance in the crisis underscores how this technology is more typically an invisible actor in the economy. Taking insurance as a problem of representation, this essay investigates what the author calls, following Raymond Williams, the sentimental ‘structure of feeling’ that has since the eighteenth century permeated cultural understands of the economic. Using as case studies the public-sphere discourse around the near-collapse of the insurance conglomerate AIG in fall 2008 and the role of insurance in Tobias Smollett's 1751 novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, the author argues that insurance exposes the continuing sentimentality of economic relationships.