The Insurance Discourse and Social Security

Abstract

This paper starts from the assumption that the prevailing discourse on social security needs reconsideration. The selection of the discourse is always crucial, as it has important implications for the social policy pursued, including its institutional arrangements. The paper advocates that social policy, as a whole, can fundamentally be based on a general insurance discourse, thus providing an understanding of social security that differs from approaches based on social assistance and mere income redistribution. It is also claimed that this approach, emphasizing a risk-centred concept of social security and a well-established legal, actuarial and institutional framework, is capable of dealing with the various pressures on social security were discussed in this journal, but at a more practical level and from a different perspective, in the paper by Kessler (1999).