Risky Business! The Crisis of Insurance and the ‘Law of Lottery’

Abstract

There can be little doubt that in recent years life has become increasingly risky. The collapse of the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) has meant that levels of social welfare and access to employment have increasingly become a game of chance — a lottery. In the UK this national lottery has recently been accompanied by an official version — the National Lottery. Risk and chance are thus basic characteristics of the production and reproduction of neo-liberal social formations: positing the economic, political and ideological premises for social reproduction. There is an increasing risk of redundancy or of not being adequately cared for when one is ill, but this is legitimated through a state-sponsored discourse of risk and chance. In other words, the lottery has developed into a social form — a form of social being — which I explore as the ‘law of lottery’.