The Values of Insurance

FRANÇOIS EWALD
TRANSLATED BY SHANA COOPERSTEIN AND BENJAMIN J. YOUNG

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 indi-
vidual 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 engen-
dered 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 hierar-
chies; it is not subject to any governmental authority whatso-
ever. 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” [sécu-
rité 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 disman-
tling of feudal solidarity and the freeing and autonomy of the
individual. Insurance is a security measure linked to individ-
ualism. 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 insur-
ance 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

120 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00266
 century was part of a movement for moral reform that made
foresight the cardinal virtue of man as social actor: foresight as
the quintessential social institution. The first insurance com-
panies insisted that there should be a proportional relationship
between premium and risk (which excluded the idea of social
transfers [transferts sociaux, or payments made to protect indi-
viduals against certain risks]). This is the golden rule of insur-
ance. It is due less to the demands of actuarial technique than to
the particular political-moral imaginary in which insurance orig-
inated, an imaginary at the root of the first forms of insurance.

From the Forbidden to the Obligatory

Today, insurance stands as a pillar of our economic and social
order and lawmakers continually expand insurance require-
ments. So it is hard to imagine that, in the beginning of the
nineteenth century, all forms of insurance (with the exception
of maritime insurance) were treated with suspicion; life and
liability insurance were prohibited as antithetical to public
order and good morals. And if fire insurance was recognized,
it was uniquely under the form of mutual insurance, which
would prevent abuses of the system by requiring those policy-
holders to engage in mutual monitoring.
Insurance was, at first, accused of allowing the insured to
loosen their oversight of their own affairs, to the point where it
encouraged delinquency. Insurance encourages crime. It seems
that this adage dates back to the first iterations of life insurance
that were based on a system of bets and wagers made on the
lives of others. It was indeed an invitation to make whoever
has been “insured” disappear. As recounted in Louis-Augustin
Boiteux’s La fortune de mer [Maritime fortunes], bets were
placed on whether
the emperor is coming to Italy, if it will be raining on the
day that the ship returns, if the queen is giving birth to a
girl, if Titio is ascending to the Capital, if the duke
Charles survives (. . .), if Luce Gentilis’s wife—aged 32
years old and 8 months pregnant—is able to remain safe
and sound, whether or not Paul of Orto will pass away a
year from now, whether Andriolina of Grimaldi will die
this year (. . .), we even bet on the life of the pope.4
Bets could be placed on everything: on George III’s return to
health, on the life of Robert Walpole, on the acquittal or convic-
tion of the Duchess of Kingstown, who was accused of bigamy.
Even in France people bet on the life of the Duke of Orléans,
regent of France. They bet on the life span of Louis XV’s mis-
tresses and how long they would remain in favor.5
These practices, which accompanied the first maritime insur-
ance contracts, had been prohibited across Europe. In particu-
lar, such acts had been prohibited by Colbert in the Marine
Ordinance of August 1681 (marine code). Nonetheless, these
practices persisted. This is reflected in a policy drafted on May
21, 1813, and conserved in Lloyd’s archives. It stipulated that

Grey Room 74, Winter 2019, pp. 120–145. © 2019 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 121
 four insurers, at a premium of three guineas for one hundred
pounds, committed to pay William Barrington five hundred
pounds if Napoléon Bonaparte died or was taken prisoner before
June 21, 1813.6 For a long time, there were suspicions raised
against life insurance contracted to the benefit of a third party,
because it encourages the disappearance of the insured party.
During the trial of La Pommeraye in 1864, in which a doctor
had assassinated a patient whom he had insured, the public
prosecutor at the Court of Cassation, Dupin, pointed out that
no subsequent orders had lifted the ban imposed by Colbert.
Legislation hostile to insurance was also motivated by the
principled position that: “it is against public propriety and
honesty to insure the life of men.”7 This is a view adopted
by many authors, including Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, who
explained that:
It is undoubtedly possible to deal with uncertainties, to sell
and to buy mere expectations [simples espérances]; but it
is necessary that the uncertainties and the expectations at
the core of the contract do not contradict either natural
feelings [sentiments de la nature] or the principles of hon-
esty. We know that there are lands where ideas about
healthy morality have been so obscured and stifled by a
vile spirit of commerce that they authorize insurance on
the life of men. However, in France, such conventions
have always been prohibited. We have proof in the
Marine Ordinance of August 1681, which only renewed
the previous defenses against insurance. Man is priceless;
life should not be commercialized; death cannot become
a matter of speculation. These kinds of wagers on the life
or death of a human being are odious, and they cannot
exist without danger. The greed that speculates on the
number of days a citizen will live often accompanies the
crime that can shorten them.8
However, good conduct is a matter of custom [bonnes moeurs
sont choses de moeurs], morality is relative, and the morals of
yesterday are not those of today.9 There was a morality of law,
and jurists were concerned, in a somewhat abstract way, only
with respect for life. But there were also economic and political
advantages that could be drawn from insurance schemes. In
1787 and 1818, the State Council authorized, in spite of
Colbert’s prohibition, the activities of the first life insurance
companies, recalling that they first offer a means to free oneself
from usury and to moralize financial investments; they “also
would revive feelings of affection and reciprocal interests that
will delight society and improve its strength.”10 Because, in
contrast to a life annuity contract, which was authorized by the
Civil Code, life insurance contracts were
more worthy of protection, because the former is too often
the result of selfishness and avarice, while the latter can
only be born from a generosity and benevolence which

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 brings the subscriber to impose on himself yearly sacri-
fices to provide the objects of his affection the well-being
and comfort that his death could deprive them of.11
Life insurance contracts were wed to the most tender of famil-
ial sentiments, and gave voice to the most respectable virtues
of sociability. The fact that life insurance “became the strongest
antidote against selfishness” gave it an air of nobility [des
lettres de noblesse].12 Morality, if one could call it that, changed
registers. It was no longer a question of knowing whether there
could be an obstacle to the principle of life insurance, of
whether life could or could not have a price. Rather, it was only
a question of evaluating the economic and social advantages of
these calculations [combinaisons]. Portalis had declared: “Such
acts are vicious in and of themselves and provide no real utility
that could compensate for the vices and abuses to which they
are susceptible.”13 He was mistaken. At the same time Portalis
rehearsed the old Colbertian condemnation of insurance,
insurance was being driven [était portée] by a new economic
morality, a morality based on time and on solidarity.
Moreover, the prohibition of life insurance rested on an ana-
lytical error, a confusion about what was to be insured. It was
not life that was insured. Pothier already emphasized that since
“Negroes exist as commercial items and are susceptible to esti-
mation,” one does not see why “the life of Negroes would not
be susceptible to an insurance contract.”14 And the grand jurist
Pardessus distinguished, with good reason, between the risk
insured and the thing itself. He explains conclusively:
It is true that the life of a man cannot be sold for any sum.
But from the fact that it cannot be evaluated in this regard,
we must not conclude that one cannot estimate the dam-
age caused by someone’s death. This is, in fact, the real goal
of insurance. An insurance company does not buy things
that it has insured; it agrees to redress the wrong that their
loss will cause. It is thus useless to examine whether life
is or is not susceptible of being sold; it suffices that death,
which is the loss of life, caused damage worth a price.
This is what cannot be called into question.15

Malpractice Insurance Suspected of Immorality

The second largest obstacle to the development of insurance
concerned malpractice insurance. Whereas “good morals” were
against the insurance of life, it was “public order” that ren-
dered malpractice insurance difficult. What will remain of
responsibility if one could insure malpractice, thus shifting the
burden of responsibility away from the individual and onto the
policyholders as a whole? How can we tolerate malpractice
insurance in a political economy founded on the idea that
“responsibility is the most perfect regulator of human action?”
Are the concepts of insurance and liability [responsabilité] not
contradictory to each other? Is it morally and thus socially

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 123

 acceptable that one can “cover” liability for a modest fee?
Moreover, does this idea of insurance not protect the same
irresponsible actions clearly prohibited by law? In the eigh-
teenth century, legal doctrine was very firm on this point. Valin
declared that “insurance could not validly take responsibility
for damages that take place at the hand—or by fault—of the
insured. Such a thing would be absurd, illusory, and fraudu-
lent. Pacta non servanda quae ad delinquendum incitant
[Agreements not observed incite transgressions].”16 Pothier
specified: “I cannot agree to let someone else take responsibil-
ity for the faults that I will commit. Such a clause would be
absurd, illusory, and fraudulent.”17 And Emerigon also stated:
“It is thus certain that insurance companies can never respond
to damages and losses that occur directly by the hand or the
fault of the insured himself; it would be, in fact, unacceptable
if the insured indemnified himself through others for a loss
which he would be the author.”18 The conflict between the law
and insurance gets to the heart of the matter; it touches on the
political economy of modern societies and on the principle of
their regulation.
One might have first thought that there were technical obsta-
cles to malpractice insurance: doesn’t the notion of risk imply
that its realization must occur independently of the will of the
insured? Is the chance that characterizes insurable risk inter-
changeable with that which the jurists classify as an unavoid-
able accident and which excludes all misconduct [commission
de faute]? The jurists would have really wanted it that way, that
one might be able to equate risk with accident, and to conflate
[rabattre . . . sur] the categories of insurance with those of law.
But the notion of risk, which expresses the statistical probabil-
ity of certain events, independent of their cause, is not of the
same order as accidents. Such fortuitous events designate, on
the contrary, a cause of damages independent of mankind and
his will, of that which he could have foreseen and would have
tried to avoid. It does not matter whether the accident was due
to imprudence or negligence. That does not imply that there
were no risks but only that self-determination [la volonté] is
one of many factors associated with risk. Insurance requires
[passe par] a sort of objectification of liberty. As Adolphe
Quételet’s Social Physics was supposed to establish: liberty is
chance, an “accidental” cause, which, far from prohibiting the
existence of statistical regularities, permits it.19
Of course, this is not to suggest that the insurance company
is not invested in the conduct of those it insures. Insurance
gives value to the thing lost by the insured. Considered in the
abstract, this practice relies on chance. But it can proceed
through speculation once insurance is in place. The problems
of “moral hazard” [risque subjectif] and of “moral contingen-
cies” are quite different from earlier precedents: all of a sud-
den, it was about knowing if the fault deemed “tortious” was
insurable; now, insurance companies are preoccupied with pre-
venting fraud and deception, as well as penalizing any fraud

124 Grey Room 74

committed by the insured.
Why did insurance companies refuse to insure negligence
[faute lourde] in the nineteenth century? Because its severity
was such that there would not be any risk? Not at all. Nor is it
because bearing witness to such obvious negligence would ren-
der insurance immoral. The obstacle is not the public order,
and its preventative measures, but the insurance company’s
concern with regard to insurance speculation: “The insured
bears the damages caused by his negligence, especially when it
is clear that, had he not been insured, he would not have suc-
cumbed to this extreme negligence.”20 Moreover, many practical
reasons militate in favor of malpractice insurance. The first rea-
son is linked to the insurance contract itself.
Should land insurance guarantee the insured only against
events causing force majeure [acts of God], this guarantee
would be illusory. In the case of fire insurance, the
insured would only ask for an indemnity if his house was
burned by lightning. The insurance premium would no
longer constitute an indemnity against the possible risks,
since such risks are so rare that the premium would
amount to nothing more than a donation.21
Alfred de Courcy confirmed that: “Insurance which does not
cover negligence would be illusory. The majority of accidents
are caused by negligence.”22 And the jurist Toullier maintained:
the proposition that “the insurance company is not held
responsible [tenu du sinistre] for that which takes place
at the known fault of the insured” must be modified and
limited to cases of gross misconduct equivalent to fraud.
Because, when I purchase fire insurance for my house, my
intention is to safeguard it against all accidents including
those which occur involuntarily at my own hand.23
The position of these authors demonstrates a remarkable
shift. This shift ensures that the contractual logic of insurance
prevails over tortious liability derived from responsibility.
The conduct of the perpetrator of the damage (in this case,
the insured) is judged [considérée] not in relationship to the
requirements for public order but only insofar as it could affect
the good faith of the contract. That is how the insurance con-
tract became the standard on which a new notion of public
order was defined. Hence, the central notion of accident and its
neutrality rendered the question of fault a secondary concern.
This tolerant position could be understood within the
privately financed framework of malpractice insurance: in this
case, only the insured and the insurance company are involved;
the insured was the first victim of his negligence, and to not
enforce the guarantee would have led to the suspension of a
contract that became too unequal. But the problem of malprac-
tice insurance would emerge within the framework of liability
insurance where, this time, the fault of the insured caused
injury to another person.

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 125

 In principle, liability insurance covers the offenses and
quasi-offenses committed by an insured. How could one admit
that you must pay for the negligence of another? Is it not a
flagrant contradiction to the principle of public order and its
imperatives of prevention to permit someone to evade a
penalty for his faults? It is difficult to imagine how guarantees
regarding the principle of liability could ever be tolerated with-
out doubts. But this is to forget that even if liability insurance
contradicts the legal administration of liability, it protects the
same interests as law, and in particular, those of the victim. The
victim no longer fears the insolvency of the person who caused
the damages. In 1844–1845, the best ways to protect the same
interests became the subject of a major dispute. At stake was
the legality of the first insurance companies against accidents,
l’Automédon. On August 21, 1844, the Commercial Court in
Paris had inquired “if it is permissible to insure accidents which
might happen to insureds, and if it is contrary to public order
to recognize [admettre] insurance on the quasi-offenses which
could be committed by the insured or by those who he employs.
This would incite carelessness.” Consequently, before the ques-
tion had even been referred to the court, the court declared that
“the agreements between parties are invalid as contrary to good
morals and public order.”24 It was a reminder of the principles
of public order: we cannot support irresponsibility.
This judgment condemned liability insurance on principle.
L’Automédon appealed to the greatest legal minds of the time,
including Pardessus, to draft a response. Pardessus began by
asking why is this contract forbidden while other kinds of
insurance (fire, the renter’s liability) are authorized? And par-
ticularly since liability insurance, unlike malpractice insur-
ance, does not benefit the insured but the victim.
In liability insurance, the insured has no interest in causing
the damage that will not benefit him in any case. Liability
insurance, as a matter of fact, guarantees the victim more so
than the perpetrator of the damage. It is driven by a “moral idea,”
particularly in relationship to car accidents, where
it was difficult to take a more humane and practical pre-
caution for the poorest classes, who are almost always
victims. Most of the time, without such a clause, these
unfortunate individuals would obtain only illusory con-
demnations directed at the people who had hurt them, or
bear the slow cost of the judicial procedure.
Moreover, the idea of this guarantee comes from the Police
Commissioner Count Angles who, “in the interest of order,
security, and free circulation” in Paris, had instituted in 1821 a
sort of guarantee fund destined to repair the numerous acci-
dents that this circulation was causing.
In addition, the type of insurance that protects the victims
of imprudence responds to the nature of the law, which “refuses
to negotiate between the perpetrator of the fault and the perpe-
trator of prejudicial negligence to others, and the person who

126 Grey Room 74

suffered from this negligence.”25 In the end, the guarantee
offered by l’Automédon was limited in its amount and covered
only the tort of the insured; that is to say, explains Pardessus,
“the acts which likely would have harmed someone physically,
but which would have been committed without malevolence,
without harm being the express purpose, and only by simple
imprudence.” Nothing is therefore more useful and moral than
this institution. On July 1, 1845, the Paris Court issued a judg-
ment in agreement with the defenders of l’Automédon.
The idea proposed by the legislator in 1804 [i.e., in the
Napoleonic Code, officially the Civil Code of the French] had
been that social interests, which must be protected by a system
of responsibility [dispositif de responsabilité], would be best
protected when any negligence or error was imputed to fault
and all fault was sanctioned. The victim would always be
indemnified, and each would be encouraged to behave with the
greatest prudence; not a single indulgence should be taken. The
idea of fault would make reparation, penalization, and preven-
tion to one another easier, to best meet the needs of public
order. Insurance introduces a new manner of protecting the
same social interests: first, those insured are saved from ruin
thanks to insurance. Does protecting social interests not
deserve more attention than the potential failure of prudence?
Second, insurance protects victims against both the uncertainty
of litigation and the possible insolvency of those responsible.
Insurance did not interfere with the motivations of the legal
system of responsibility so much as it made up for its short-
comings. The time is no longer very far away when the protec-
tion of public order by the sanction of faults will appear like a
complex, theoretical objective, unsuitable and somewhat
incomprehensible in regard to the practical demands to be sat-
isfied, when the technical-legal rules of liability will appear
very rudimentary in relationship to that which enables insur-
ance. This is because insurance has an advantage over the legal
system of liability [dispositif juridique de responsabilité]. The
latter offers reparation by condemning the activity that caused
the damage, or the manner in which it was carried out.
Insurance, on the contrary, enables both the continued activity
and protection of its possible victims. The development of
industrial societies multiplied the situations where profitable
and useful activities caused damages that could not be imputed
to fault, where the distinction that must be made, according to
the law, between the activity and the manner in which one
exercised the activity, proves to be factitious. So much so that
if choosing between forbidding the activity and forcing it to
redress the damages it may cause in any circumstance, as a
kind of inherent risk, one will choose the second solution—and
thus, insurance.
Practically speaking, it was the courts that had to manage the
conflict between morality and responsibility. They did this
with a double concern in mind: to give the insurance contract
all its value and to provide the best protection for victims.

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 127

 Therefore they multiplied the faults, which in turn created the
market for responsibility, which could then be exploited by
insurance companies. In return, insurance permitted judges to
expand the field and the amount of compensation but also the
field of responsibilities, which would have been inconceivable
without insurance. This spiraling process inevitably led to
the disqualification of laws concerning responsibility in the
management of damage reparations.
What was once prohibited by the French Revolution and its
jurists thus became elevated to the rank of political technology
less than one century later by a singular reversal of values.
Indeed, the champions of the Third Republic created insurance,
and in this way it became social, the very basis of the modern
social contract. And so we entered into the age of “insurance
societies,” with their long procession of insurance obligations.

The Ethics of Insurance

The conflicts between the values surrounding insurance are far
from being resolved. The battle still roars. But the weapons,
terrain, and maneuvers have changed. Now, in contrast to the
nineteenth century, the fight is no longer directed against
insurance but between insurance institutions; the battle is no
longer over knowing whether one event or another, or a certain
behavior, must be treated as a risk, but on the legitimacy of
specific insurance institutions (premiums, mutuals, or social
insurance) to cover specific types of risk. The conflict between
social welfare and the insurance market takes place within the
frame of the contemporary crisis of the welfare state. The
debate concerning the creation of pension funds, as well as the
opposition between capitalization and distribution, also corre-
sponds to the battle waged on the moral terrain. This is not to
suggest that morality would be on one side and immorality on
the other. Rather, this is a battle between two moralities, a com-
bat asserted by the different participants involved. The themes,
the arguments, repeated a thousand times by Denis Kessler,
president of the FFSA, have always highlighted the moral and
moralizing aspects of voluntary membership in pension funds.26
Conversely, the opponents—whether trade unionists or politi-
cal opponents—never miss an opportunity to invoke values
like solidarity and equality. One could even argue that in the
face of unfavorable economic and demographic realities they
sought an advantage on the moral terrain.
The same goes in the domain of health insurance, especially
as this concerns questions systematically used for selection
and exclusion. It is clear that for many actors, such as doctors
or those covered by social insurance, the uncertainties that led
them to acquire medical coverage stemmed from the fear asso-
ciated with the moralization of medical consumption. They
had a hunch that the “insurancialization” of health risk man-
agement could lead to a new relationship between individuals
and illness that would privilege values other than those of social
security today: the old culture of deficit—never condemned

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because it was evidence of the importance of coverage—would
be replaced by a morality of the economy; the privilege given
to ignorance would give way to a demand for knowledge; and
systematic indemnification would cede to prevention. When
the mutual insurance scheme Mutuelles 45 proliferates adver-
tising campaigns with the theme “health is not a business,” it
claims morality as its battleground.27 When mutuals without
intermediaries evoke the virtues of the social economy while
they practice insurance according to the same techniques as
their competitors, it is because they seek a decisive advantage
on the moral terrain.
Insurance draws its morality from the practice of a certain
type of rationality; it shares the same logic that implicated the
notion of risk and that formalized the calculation of probabili-
ties. What makes insurance unique is that it gives to certain
events an objectivity that alters their nature. Insurance, first,
reverses the signs: it makes that which was until then consid-
ered an obstacle into a possibility. It frees from fear:
The first and one of the most salutary effects of insurance
is to eliminate from human affairs the fear that paralyzes
all activity and numbs the soul. Rex est qui metuit nihil
[He is a king who fears nothing], Seneca someplace said.
Freed from fear, man is the king of creation: he dares to
act; even the ocean is so obedient that he can entrust it
with his fortune.28
Insurance, furthermore, assumes a structure in which each
person can objectify themselves, individually and in relation
to others. It turns man into capital. In the 1860s, a whole
campaign in favor of life insurance took place on this theme.
Man is capital as, for example, Louis Richard explained: “It is
very simple. A patriarch occupies a position in administration,
commerce or industry; this job gives him an annual revenue of
10,000 francs; at a rate of 5 percent, 10,000 francs becomes the
income of 200,000 francs; thus the patriarch represents a capi-
tal of 200,000 francs.”29 And he adds that “there is no capital
more precious than man, source of all wealth.”30
The source of all value is itself a potential value that becomes
real thanks to insurance. If to insure oneself can be a duty, it
is first because of basic economic concerns that drive us to not
destroy wealth. At the end of the seventeenth century, William
Petty made the calculation of man’s value one of the tasks of
political arithmetic: he estimated the value of an Englishman
to be a little less than six shillings.31 Insurance provides a means
to realize, preserve, and even multiply this already abstract value.
As we all know, the ethical outlook that precedes insurance
had first been considered and implemented by Pascal. In
response to questions that had been posed to him by his friend
the chevalier de Méré, Pascal constructed the following rule:
when, in a multiround game, one of the players decides to leave
before his turn, the players may evenly distribute the bets
placed. This rule—the division of stakes—requires calculating

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 129

 the value of the bets placed according to the probability of
winning or losing. Pascal would resume this line of thinking in
his famous argument now known as “Pascal’s Wager.”
The transition from mathematical reasoning to a medita-
tion on human life came naturally: if the behavior of the
fallen man, the contingency of his being, the arbitrary
harshness of laws that imitate a game of chance, lead to
his death and certainty that the game will be brutally
interrupted, it is then possible to reach a decision.32
Pascal’s Wager thus defines with precision a method of decision-
making, according to which life assumes a new meaning, and
the value of values is profoundly reevaluated.
Underlying insurance there is a kind of reasoning that can
be broken down into four major values that occupy the field of
the moral: responsibility, solidarity, justice, and truth. These
four values are considered to be the cardinal points of insur-
ance. They are the summits of its magic square.

Responsibility
The first value of insurance is responsibility. The word should
not be confused with the sense conferred on it by jurists in
the nineteenth century, when they made this quality of man an
offense subject to punishment. “Responsibility” first had a
political and social significance. The word itself, which did not
appear until 1787, referred to a principle of political regulation
that prevented individuals from transferring expenses they had
incurred onto others. Whether you suffer injury or are struck
by an event, you have no right to request aid or assistance from
others. The principle of responsibility directly opposes the
principle of assistance and the idea of charity. As Thiers wrote
in 1850,
The fundamental principle of any society is that each man
is charged with providing for his needs and the needs of
his family through assets earned or passed down. Without
this principle all activity would cease in a society. This is
because if man could count on work other than his own
to survive, he would gladly delegate to someone else all
the worries and hardship of life.33
The formulation of this principle accompanied liberal phi-
losophy. This principle is about teaching people to have fore-
sight, to turn themselves toward the future, preventing them
from living only in the present. The principle of responsibility
rests on a relationship between man and nature such that any-
thing that happens to me is a sanction, good or bad. Because I
am responsible for myself, I must attribute to no one other than
myself the cause of my failures. These failures, even if they are
caused by other circumstances—for instance, a difficult eco-
nomic climate—are still only my fault: it is I who did not take
into account one specific element, who did not understand the
laws of nature or was incapable of using them; in any case,

130 Grey Room 74

with a few exceptions, it is my fault. I am the single point of
imputation for everything that happens to me. “To err is
human,” so says the adage. And so, the principle of responsi-
bility converted all error into fault.
The principle of responsibility is based on a method of man-
aging causality that implies a self-regulation of conduct and
activities. Insofar as no one can attribute to another his or her
own failures and suffering, failure and suffering will become
the indefinite principle of their own amendment. The principle
of responsibility, founded on the notion of fault, acts as a uni-
versal converter to right wrongs. But it is particularly demand-
ing. From this point of view [dans son optique], security should
not be a right but rather a duty. This is because there is no place
in this philosophy for the notion of the victim. In this world, to
suffer a misfortune gives you no right to anything. And no mat-
ter what feelings of compassion and pity the victim might
inspire, the victim is always believed to be the sole actor in his
or her own destiny. Because man has foresight, he lacks excuses.
He owes his security to prudence. He also owes his security to
the capacity to join forces with others to offset the effects of fate.
Foresight is the great virtue of Enlightenment philosophy,
and it remained so in the nineteenth century. It is because of
foresight that responsibility prohibits the transfer or imposition
of an individual’s burden onto others (except in the case where
that burden was the fault of another). Foresight requires being
aware of the risks to which one is subjected because one must
cope with one’s own decisions [initiative]. The world of fore-
sight is a world in which each person must recognize him- or
herself as weak and fragile, subjected to endless blows from
fate and reversals of fortune. It is an unbalanced world where
man knows too often he has been defeated and can hardly
think about how he could exploit science or a technique usu-
ally unavailable to rebalance his relationship to nature. Rather,
he must appeal to ruse, to intelligence, to the calculation of
probabilities, which teaches him that accidents do not happen
without laws and that these laws are foundational to mutuals,
companies through which one can rationally cope. And that is
how insurance touted its merits throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury: it represents the institutionalization of rational foresight.
In a world governed by foresight, man has no other resources
than arithmetic and virtue. Confronted by the possibility
of unavoidable accidents, the only available resource is to
learn to compensate for them. Foresight created the demand
for insurance.
Foresight can only be free; it is a virtue and cannot be forced
on anyone. Therefore there is a fundamental contradiction
between responsibility and compulsory insurance. It is the
great division, the great judgment matrix of the nineteenth
century: there are those who have foresight (and who the state
must aid and encourage through incentive policy, because the
state is itself interested in the development of this virtue), and
the others who lack foresight. There is no need to abandon

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 131

 them. They will benefit from the aid of welfare. But this will
cause them to become dependent on others, and dependence is
the worst condition for man.
Insurance is in service of foresight. It is that form of associ-
ation that implements foresight and permits the coexistence of
liberty and security.
The end of the nineteenth century is marked by the acknowl-
edgment of the failure of foresight. The word had, as a matter
of fact, practically disappeared from our vocabulary. Insurance
requirements proliferated because of this failure, particularly
within the framework of social insurance.34 It was a failure of
morality. One no longer spoke of moral requirements but of
social needs. It is always the same story: if choosing between
liberty and security, mankind always ends up favoring security.

Solidarity
“Man is capital,” Edmond About repeats in a successful book
on insurance in which he clarifies that the value of man as
capital depends on his partnership [association] with others:
You know that the wheels of cars, while driving on
asphalt, wear away more than twenty kilos of iron and
disperse it through the streets of Paris each day.
These 20 kilos of precious metal scattered everywhere
are not destroyed but are lost. Their infinitesimal division
makes them useless and renders them imperceptible.
Suppose that a patient and ingenious worker came to
collect these iron atoms, and to give them cohesiveness,
strength [résistance], and return to them all their former
qualities. The worker puts them in the forge and draws
from it a lever. Would he not have created a capital useful
for men? One cent is no more capital than steel wool is a
lever. It hardly has a value; you will find very few individ-
uals who are sensitive to the loss or gain of one cent,
because an isolated penny amounts to nothing. But who-
ever through an honest process obtains from his fellow
citizens of the earth this single useless penny could create
a capital of 10 million; that is to say, it could become a
handsome lever for moving mountains.35
Where we are nothing individually, we become everything
in solidarity. To insure oneself is not only an individual duty,
in the sense that to not be insured “is to commit an act of self-
ishness and to be guilty of carelessness against one’s family
(. . .), to take responsibility of one’s future misery.” To not be
insured, “is to play with scourges; that is to say with fire, with
the sea, with hailstorms, with death.”36 It is even a social duty:
those who do not insure themselves become a double burden
for society, due to the assistance they will require if they are the
victim of an accident, and because the penny that they have
refused to share would, when added to those of others, have
helped create a capital useful to all. Listen again to About:

132 Grey Room 74

 The son of a family who inherited a million and who
“invests” the money in amusements is like a malicious
worker who, while filing a lever, reduces it to dust. The
stupid worker could say to his boss: “I have taken nothing
from you; weigh your iron filings, it’s all there.” The
dandy will sing a familiar tune: “It is not lost for every-
one! Go see the most fashionable car maker, horse sales-
men, linen maids, tailors, jewelry-makers, and chefs; you
will find in their hands the shavings of my million.” By
Jove! We know that the money is not lost. But you have
scattered it, you little idiot. You have disrupted the cohe-
sion that gave strength to capital and the levers. It will
take years of work and savings to reconstruct the instru-
ment that you have destroyed! The destruction of capital
is a calamity that weighs not only on the ruined man but
also on all humanity in its entirety. The creation of capital
does not enrich the individual but the entire species. Of
all the mechanisms that have been invented to repair the
destruction of existing capital and to build more capital
on earth, the most ingenious and honest is insurance. It is
through insurance that we all become capitalists in a
given time.37
The idea of solidarity is incumbent on the economy of insur-
ance even prior to all social concerns. Insurance leads to an
objectification of the relationship between the whole and its
parts and between society and its individuals; it is a relation-
ship that we will encounter again in future doctrines on soli-
darity. Solidarity exists in a particular space and time, from
which the objectification of individual duty as a social duty
derives. When reasoning only from his own limited perspec-
tive, the individual not only becomes guilty of selfishness but
also loses an enormous opportunity for social gain. Insurance,
through the alchemy of its calculations, reveals the waste of
individualism. Insurance encourages determining the obliga-
tions of the individual on the basis of the whole. And insurance
incited About to imagine what happens when a million-dollar
home burns down:
See the consequences of a similar accident. They touch
you more closely than you think, even though you don’t
even know the name of the owner. There is a million less
here, that is less capital, less instruments, one less lever.
Of the total sum accumulated up until our days by man
and for man, it is necessary to deduct a million. The great
human partnership [association] is less rich today than it
was yesterday. It might seem like nothing because you
don’t know how tight the solidarity that unites us all is;
but think about it for a moment, and you will understand
that the poor, like the rich, are interested in increasing
social capital (. . .) The destruction of a million already
gathered together [tout formé] is more harmful to you all
than the destruction of 100 million pennies [centimes]

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 133

 between the hands of 100 million individuals. You will
say to me that in fact the damage is identical, since in the
two cases the total public wealth experienced the same
decrease. But remind yourself that capital is a lever, an
instrument destined to make work less hard and more
useful, and tell me if the destruction of a lever weighing 5
kilos would not be more harmful than the levy of a centi-
gram of iron from 500,000 levers.38
One plus one equals more than two; the whole is more than
the sum of its parts. What has the power to override the most
glaringly obvious arithmetical laws, to transform addition into
multiplication? The “unconscious solidarity that unites men,”
to which “insurance gives a precise shape, both scientific and
practical.”39 Insurance is thus nothing other than the mecha-
nism that in practice reveals society to itself, that manifests
society and explicates it as truth:
Life insurance is not only an urgent [impérieux] duty, it
also is the expression of a universal law. This law is one
of the most salient, one of the most forcefully ingrained in
nature: we call it the law of the conservation of species;
it ensures that the ancestors' expenses do not pass down
to their descendants and that the future of a generation is
prepared, protected, and insured by the generation that
precedes it.40
The idea of solidarity, which furnishes one of the greatest
social doctrines of the late nineteenth century, has without a
doubt multiple origins. One of them is to be found in the kind
of objectification implied by the technology of insurance. It is
interesting to note that, before being an antiliberal social doc-
trine supported by socialists, solidarity was the theme of a large
public campaign in favor of life insurance supporting the idea
that to insure oneself is a social duty. This is the capitalist origin
of the doctrine of solidarity.
About’s argument preceded Léon Bourgeois’s formulation of
the doctrine of solidarity—from which the current meaning
of solidarity derives—by some thirty years. He exposes with
great meticulousness how insurance involved a spiritual con-
version (to view one’s actions from the point of view of all),
which gave a new, radically anti-individualist significance to
the idea of liberty. Solidarity based on insurance could not
exist without responsibility. Specifically, it gave responsibility
a new meaning: one has not only a responsibility to oneself
but also a responsibility to the whole. Insurance and solidarity
are therefore not opposed. On the contrary. The now familiar
opposition came late. It opposes different kinds of solidarity.
Today, solidarity refers either to practices of transfer and redis-
tribution (tied to the concept of social insurance), or to certain aid
practices that are only cautiously called “charity” or “welfare.”
The concept of solidarity (as it concerns insurance) is a
stronger concept, more demanding than that of mutual insur-

134 Grey Room 74

ance schemes [mutualité].41 Whereas a mutuality is a technical
concept, solidarity is a moral one. Not all mutuality is joint
[solidaire] (in the insurance sense of the word). To pool
[Mutualiser] is to to organize risk sharing within a population.
From this point of view, there is no insurance without mutual-
ity. Indeed, to understand the danger of risk is not only to imag-
ine its possibility but also to think that dreaded events unite
you to others who also confront the same risk “equally.”
The forms of mutuality that insure protection against risks are
numerous: the family, the municipality [commune], the busi-
ness, the state. Insurance belongs to the large family of political
associations and represents an invention in their field.
Precisely, it is the invention of a joint association [association
solidaire] in the sense developed in the argument by About.
Insurance companies face a problem after the conclusion of
a contract; that is, how to convince the insured to feel respon-
sible for others, as called for by solidarity. It is a problem of
“moral hazard [risque moral]” that was first remedied by the
idea that mutual insurance schemes allowed individuals to
exercise “mutual” control. By virtue of the proximity of its
members, individuals associated with the mutual could exer-
cise reciprocal surveillance over each other. But that implies
that mutual insurance remains small in size, a society without
a megaphone, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau may have put it. The
fight against moral hazard justifies the existence of contractual
franchises [franchises contractuelles].
The notion of solidarity, captured by social security [sécurité
sociale], is an invention of insurers. The word appears in its
current meaning and no longer in its legal sense (which
referred to the fact of being jointly liable for a debt) thanks to
insurance. Frédéric Bastiat showed that solidarity is similar to
mutual dependence through the mechanisms of the economy.42
We are familiar with solidarity—one could call it fraternity. It
consists in sticking together during times of misfortune and to
not abandon those who are in need. It is a very old idea. As old,
no doubt, as the existence of human collectivities. Insurance
relies upon another idea of mutuality. First, there is the idea
that the contribution will have an exact measurement. Neither
too much, nor too little. There is, above all, the economic idea
that, through association, that which would be otherwise lost
could yield a profit. Solidarity based on insurance does not
depend on the expenditure; it depends on the principle
of investment and of accumulation. That is why the power of
insurance can “move mountains”; it transforms the load into
the lever. These are the same values, the same arguments that
we find in the contemporary debate on pension funds. Insurance
fosters an economy of accumulation that is permitted by
democracy because it is founded on the idea of the masses. It
transforms the value of individuals: Those very people who
could think that they personally amount to nothing (because
they are too small) discover that they amount to everything
collectively.

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 135

 Justice
Insurance is not only the transaction that provides, in return
for minimum installments, compensation for the losses that
could strike one person or another, thanks to the benefaction of
mutual insurance. To reduce it to this transaction would not
distinguish it from guilds and fraternities or other venerable
kinds of relief, aid, or solidarity. What characterizes insurance
is not only that it disperses the expense of individual damages
across an entire group but that this distribution is no longer
understood as a kind of aid or charity. Instead, it is empowered
by the rule of justice, capable of being made explicit:
Insurance is nothing other than the application to human
affairs of the rule for the division of stakes; this allows us
to determine the fate of people who wish to leave [the
game] before chance has decided between them and who
want to have at their disposal the common funds created
through their bets.43
Thanks to the rule of justice based on insurance [justice assu-
rancielle], each person’s contribution to the whole can be made
before the event and not only after the fact.
Justice is linked to the notion of equality. To be just consists
of treating equal things equally. But there are many forms of
equality. Aristotle distinguished between two forms of equal-
ity: mathematical equality must prevail in contracts and geo-
metrical equality in the distribution of honors. One can
contrast the formal equality of rights (which do not take into
account inequalities of circumstance) with the equality of sit-
uations (which implies that the same rule can only be applied
equally in the same situations) and with equality of opportu-
nity (which calls on affirmative action). Marx, who contrasted
formal equality to real equality, formulated the following rule
of justice: “From each according to his ability, to each accord-
ing to his needs,” which is very nonegalitarian.44 More recently,
the American philosopher John Rawls explained that justice
operates according to two principles: the principle of equality
of rights must be supplemented [complété] by a principle of
difference.45 According to the principle of difference, inequali-
ties could be just so long as they accompany a social function
that ameliorates the situation of the weakest over time.
Insurance, as a specific practice of justice, implements a rule
that issues from the notion of equity (or what is called “fair-
ness” in English), which is expressed by a certain proportion-
ality of the premium to the risk. From the point of view of risk,
individuals are not all equal. They do not all die at the expected
moment according to the average life expectancy. Facing the
dreaded event, people do not all have equal chances, whether
it is for reasons of fact or comportment. Justice based on insur-
ance [justice assurancielle] wants, in principle, the contribu-
tion to the whole to be proportional to the risk, even if, in
practice, the rule that sets the price of the risk changes according
to each type of risk. This rule of proportionality leads us to dis-

136 Grey Room 74

tinguish risks from each other: to select them. It is a notion that
gives rise to much confusion.
Selection has been a shameful word, taboo in the French
vocabulary, at least since 1968. This is the result of an egalitar-
ianist culture of equality [une culture égalitariste de l’égalité].
It is necessary to distinguish between the selection of a risk,
exclusion, and discrimination.
First, selection is the opposite of exclusion, like the insur-
able is the opposite of the uninsurable. What we call exclusion
corresponds to those who are denied insurance. They are
extremely rare, exceeding no more than 1 percent of insurance
requests. The denial of coverage stems less from the will of the
insurer to cover only the right risks than to the limits of insur-
ability: a risk taken, a risk whose likelihood is such that
the proportion between the premium and the risk no longer
makes sense, a risk that depends too much on the behavior of
the insured.
We often believe selection and equality are contradictory,
especially in the meaning conferred on these terms by the
rights of man. Yet, reading the Declaration [of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen] of 1789 shows that there cannot be equality
without selectivity. At the same time that the famous article 1
formulates the principle of equality of rights—“All men are
born free and equal”—it concludes with a principle of distinc-
tion: “Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general
good [l’utilité commune].” It is the same in article 6 (concern-
ing access to public posts)46 and in article 13 (concerning rais-
ing taxes).47 The relation between the principle of equality and
the rule of selection is straightforward: the formulation of a rule
of equality establishes a criterion for comparison (specifically,
it makes individuals comparable), and, consequently, it intro-
duces a principle of selection. So, selection does not oppose
equality. Rather, it opposes discrimination: a selection could be
discriminatory and then becomes a criminal offense. When can
a rule of selection be called discriminatory?
From the aforementioned articles of the Declaration of Rights
of 1789, and from the jurisprudence of the Constitutional
Council or the State Council regarding abuse of power, one can
derive the rule that discrimination takes place whenever the
criterion of selection has no relation to its object: for example,
to base access to public employment on sex or race.
The same rationale applies to insurance. Risk, in the case of
insurance, formulates a rule of equality; it makes individuals
facing the same event comparable and at the same time reveals
their differences. Risk is a rule of justice. This rule of justice
puts in place a principle of comparison that is, at the same
time, a principle of differentiation. The selection of a risk is not
discriminatory as long as its criterion is a determinant of risk.
This is what determines law, including in matters of health.48
The principle of actuarial equity is: equal risk, equal treat-
ment. It is rarely applied that way. According to the risks, prac-
tices and regulations introduce many modifications. So, there

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 137

 are the rules of the bonus/malus system in car insurance,
which, in fact, use the good risks to cover the bad risks. There
is also the guarantee of natural catastrophes that does not take
into account risk exposure. And there are rules that determine
coverage for medical risks in supplementary health insurance.
Insurance is a social science: its principles regulate as much as
they organize. Risk by risk, they deal with the requests and
expectations of society toward insurance.

Truth
Insurance occupies itself with the truth and does not compro-
mise with it. Perhaps this is what makes it so difficult to tolerate.
Sigmund Freud explains that mankind is not naturally
devoted to truth.49 On the contrary, he believes that man’s prim-
itive attitude is inclined to distort reality. This is the function
of dreams: to find a path to satisfaction that economizes the
hardship of the real. The pleasure principle turns away from
reality and toward the object of desire, seeking satisfaction in
the recollection of agreeable imagery. The reality principle is
secondary and only develops because the pleasure principle
does not lead to satisfaction. Besides, it is a traditional teaching
of philosophy that men are not naturally disposed toward
knowledge; they only become so when constrained. One does-
n't leave the cave without violence.
At the crossroads of these contradictory needs, Freud iden-
tified a singular intellectual mechanism that he called negation
(die Verneinung).50 Negation refers to a certain manner of relat-
ing to reality that consists of denying it at the same moment of
its recognition. Negation seems to be the natural behavior
toward risk. At the same time that one recognizes it, one seeks
to diminish its importance, both individually and collectively.
Negation is the act of saying that accidents will only happen to
others, or of claiming for oneself a behavior so prudent that it
protects you from all trouble. Negation could be knowing that
you have been exposed to a contagious disease but refusing the
test that would allow you to confirm its presence. It is always a
negation to indefinitely reject the necessary measures to con-
front the retirement problems caused by the new demographic
situation and longer life spans. Negation is ignoring the deficits
of social security and passing on the burden to future genera-
tions. Negation also is the speech given by a doctor to his
patient declaring him healed after a serious operation, suggest-
ing that the patient could behave as if the malady had never
taken place. The attitude of negation also appears in the collec-
tive attitude toward preventative campaigns against tobacco
and alcohol. Negation exploits ambiguity, quid pro quo, and
misunderstanding—all manners of speaking that permit one to
both disclose and withhold at the same time.
Insurance is merciless toward this attitude. It constrains to
the truth, in several ways.
Risk above all is a principle of truth-telling [véridiction]. It
is a way to make events objective, to confer on them a certain

138 Grey Room 74

reality, the reality of their price, their true value, or at least their
economic value. When, in response to a request for insurance,
the insurance company fixes the price of risk, the insured
becomes aware of a reality that he did not necessarily suspect
exists and that often surprises him. And, in principle, the act
of insurance involves, on the behalf of the insured, the recog-
nition of the reality of risks. One of the professional tasks of the
insurer is to guide, and this characterizes the duty to advise.
The insurer has an interest in how the insured perceive the
truth, because it is their awareness that influences the rational
outcome of insurance. But in fact the perception of risk takes
place in conditions such that it is often necessary to compel
them into insurance by way of obligations.
Insurance companies are devoted to truth—they have a stake
in it. To practice life insurance with erroneous mortality tables
can only lead to bankruptcy. The commitments made by the
insurance company last for such a long term that errors must be
avoided at all costs. One of the principal motivations for the
development of actuarial science was, on the part of the state,
the problem of calculating life annuities when developing
borrowing policies: which price was fair? Who, between the
annuitant and the state, won in the end? The concern for truth
demands researching the fairest criteria for determining the
reality of the risk. Competition and the existence of a market
create an incentive for truth that is hardly ever found in sys-
tems for collective risk management such as social security,
which, perhaps because of their monopoly, function rather
blindly.
At the same time, insurance companies are obligated to be
truthful to the mutuality that they guarantee. Each insured
expects the insurance company to evaluate risk as meticulously
as possible. The obligation of the insurance company has its
counterpart in the obligation of the insured to say what he
knows about the risk from which he seeks protection. Within
the frame of insurance contracts, the declaration of risk consti-
tutes the moment of truth. Legislators and courts have progres-
sively constructed and clarified its conditions.
The requirement for truth can find itself in conflict with
other ethical imperatives. It can be in conflict, for example,
with medical privacy or the confidentiality of personal data.
Information relevant to risk always concerns private life, the
intimate details of individuals, in particular, in the case of life
and health insurance, medical information. Such delicate
material is organized around four grand principles: the first is
that secrecy should not protect fraud; the second is that infor-
mation concerning risk must be the most objective possible and
should not include the details [caractéristiques] of the private
life of individuals.51
But this ethical conflict can also affect, in a much more
fundamental way, even the possibility of releasing certain
information about risk, as in the case of genetic information. In
this case, the need for truth conflicts both with the right of the

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 139

 person concerned “not to know” (this right is recognized by
law in the concept of informed consent), and with any ban that
could be placed on an insurance company from seeking infor-
mation even directly linked to risk. Such questions have engen-
dered considerable debate in France and abroad, but have not
yet been settled.
Knowledge is necessary to evaluate risk and to make it
insurable. It is a law of insurance that insurability increases
with knowledge.
The insured is obligated to declare information at his dis-
posal concerning the risk that he wishes to transfer. This is not
intended for the insurance company as much as it is for the
mutuality of insureds from whose solidarity he wishes to ben-
efit. Information pertaining to a risk allows it to be estimated
fairly, and is a prerequisite for the insurance company to be
able to distribute expenses equitably in the pool of the insured
[mutualité]. The obligation to inform is an obligation to the
mutuality. The suspension of this obligation, even at the insis-
tence of the insured, can lead not only to fraud, but above all to
what economists call adverse selection [antisélection]: when
the price of risk is inexact, only those most exposed to risk have
a stake [intérêt] in insurance. And eventually, those least exposed
to risk can no longer find a way to insure themselves. Banning
the insurance company from knowing things leads to inequity
in the mutual: certain people, aware of the reality of their risk,
seek to insure themselves, knowing that the risk will be sup-
ported by the mutuality in the end. If these people are favored
socially, the game becomes socially inequitable because it
increases the expense of the least favored.
Sapere aude.52 Private interest is not the only beneficiary of
insurance’s practice of truth-telling [véridiction]. Truth-telling
affects not only the relationship between the insurer and the
insured, and, through an intermediary, among the insured. It
also has a social interest. Truth enables prudence and preven-
tion. Insurance is the offspring of the Enlightenment; its first
defenders were those who respected this philosophy: Lavoisier,
Condorcet, Laplace. Insurance is linked to a cultural decision
that makes it necessary to live according to truth rather than in
ignorance, that the knowledge of truth furnishes the instru-
ments that allow us to overcome harm. Insurance is linked to a
civilization that makes recognizing risk a moral imperative, a
principle of rational conduct. It is linked to a civilization that
refuses the comfort of ignorance, even shared.

|||||

Insurance is an embodied morality that revolves around these

four values: responsibility, solidarity, justice, and truth. In insur-
ance, these values are interdependent and refer to one another.
It is possible to unpack the morality of insurance by picking
one of the values at random. But in insurance, these four values
take on a special meaning. And their particular significance

140 Grey Room 74

establishes insurance as a specific kind of partnership. These
values define man’s particular outlook toward the uncertain,
toward the world, and toward others. The values associated
with insurance have, at the same time, a political dimension.
They are the result of societal choice. They are the values of a
society founded on insurance [une société assurancielle]. Far
from being a society without values, a society founded on
insurance is a strict society, maybe even a rigid, terribly virtuous
society. Such a society is not necessarily compatible with our
current state of “permissiveness.” Insurance’s key values render
a society founded on insurance something like a utopia as
defined by Thomas More and Campanella.
Since the eighteenth century, insurance has given rise to two
kinds of moral conflicts. The first was motivated by the recog-
nition of this ethos’s morality. These conflicts emerged again in
the 1930s with people who denounced insurance as immoral.
The academic Georges Duhamel is one example.53 And much
of the contemporary bias against insurance originates more or
less explicitly in this time. But, during the nineteenth century,
the conflict rapidly shifted. Projects seeking to withdraw insur-
ance from the hands of insurance companies multiplied. So
that is how social insurance institutions, starting from the late
nineteenth century, exploited the notion of solidarity and the
cooperation between law and state, to claim to be a moral force.
As a result, for many citizens today, social security represents
the moral kind of insurance.
But maybe we have entered into a new phase. In fact, it has
become commonplace to denounce the demoralization enacted
by social insurance institutions. Social insurance appears as a
demoralized and demoralizing kind of insurance. Social insur-
ance, it is commonly said, first and foremost removes all sense
of responsibility. The solidarity that it requires no longer corre-
sponds to the moral imperative to take into account the signif-
icance of one’s actions from the point of view of the collective
good. This is because social insurance allows everyone the abil-
ity to outsource their problems indefinitely; the notion of jus-
tice is so obscured that certain individuals denounce, in the
name of equity, an equality that benefits only the rich; as for
truth, it is often sacrificed to the cult of equality. Both moral
conflicts that arise from insurance are far from being resolved.
There is a certain hostility, at least in France, toward the
insurance marketplace. It is often a matter of perception [affaire
d'image] (which is presumed negative). It is doubtless neces-
sary to distinguish this perception [image] (which essentially
depends on the quality of service) from the legitimacy of insur-
ance, whether its legitimacy in principle or its legitimacy to
cover certain risks. And this inquiry into legitimacy explicitly
refers us back to the moral dimension of insurance. Insurance
must develop within the context of a struggle that is not only
economic (with regard to competitors) but also axiological.
Perhaps this is what singles out insurance in the economic
world: its legitimacy is perpetually in question. The insurance

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 141

 market, in order to develop, must prevail on the ground of val-
ues. In this struggle, there are not necessarily losers; this is
because insurance is a moral strength.
The history of insurance is wedded to the history of morality—
or more exactly, to the history of conflicts between individual
morality and collective morality. The conditions necessary for
insurance to develop first appeared when collective morality
became a morality of individual foresight. Insurance finds
itself marginalized when the collective morality shifts from
solidarity to “solidarism.” It will rediscover its complete legit-
imacy only when the utopia that drives it becomes once again
a social utopia.

142 Grey Room 74

Notes
Originally published as François Ewald, “Les valeurs d’assurance,” in
Encyclopédie de l’assurance, ed. François Ewald and Jean-Hervé Lorenzi
(Paris: Economica, 1998), 399–424. This translation has been supported by
Insight Development Grant 430-2017-00065 awarded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
1. Jean Halpérin, Les assurances en Suisse et dans le monde: Leur rôle
dans l’évolution économique et sociale (Neufchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière,
1946), 22.
2. Halpérin, 28.
3. [See Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the
History and Psychology of the Modern Business Man (1913), trans. Mortimer
Epstein (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1915); and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), trans. Talcott Parsons (London: George
Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1930).—Trans.]
4. Louis-Augustin Boiteux, La fortune de mer: Le besoin de sécurité et les
débuts de l’assurance maritime (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1968), 73.
5. Joseph Hémard, Théorie de pratique des assurances terrestres (Paris:
Recueil Sirey, 1924), 171.
6. Boiteux, 75.
7. Robert Joseph Pothier, Traité des contrats aléatoires (Paris: Chez les
frères Debure, 1777).
8. Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis and Frédéric Portalis, “Des choses qui peu-
vent être vendues,” in Discours, rapports et travaux préparatoires du Code
civil, exposé des motifs du contrat de vente (Paris: Joubert, 1844), 244–45.
The same opinion is professed by Corvetto who, while presenting the Code
of Commerce concerning insurance to the legislative body in 1807, declares:
“We have said in article 334 that all the values estimable by money could
form a subject of insurance except where the liberty of man is at stake.” This
is an opinion found in the same year in Merlin’s Répertoire: “Such conven-
tion is contrary to good morals and could encourage a lot of deception.”
9. [Ewald is likely citing Alfred de Courcy, Le droit et les ouvriers (Paris:
Librairie Cotillon, 1886), 64.—Trans.]
10. [A similar quotation appears in multiple editions of the Dictionnaire
de l’économie politique. See, for example, Frédéric Bastiat, “Tontines,” in
Dictionnaire de l’économie politique, vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie de Guillaumin et
Cie, 1864), 744. Unlike Ewald’s quote, which states “elles ‘ranimeraient aussi
ces sentiments d’affection . . . ’” (they “also would revive feelings of affection
. . . ”), the dictionary instead uses the verb ramèneraient, meaning they
“would restore . . . .”—Trans.]
11. The State Council’s two decisions are reproduced in Livre du cente-
naire de “la Nationale,” [ancienne compagnie royale d’assurances sur la vie,]
1830–1930 (Paris [1930]), 393.
12. J.-B. Juvigny, Coup d’oeil sur l’assurance de la vie des hommes (Paris:
Delaunay, 1818), 72. The same argument will be taken up by the “four prin-
ciple companies” in response to the condemnation by the public prosecutor
Dupin in 1864: “With regard to the morality of the institution, do we actually
need to prove it? And if we ask how it can justify imposing annual hardships
on patriarchs to insure his family’s lot in case of a premature death, our con-
sciences will respond.” Livre du centenaire de “la Nationale,” 457.
13. [This reference likely comes from Portalis and Portalis, 287.—Trans.]
14. [Robert Joseph Pothier, “Traité du contrat d’assurance,” in Oeuvres de
Pothier: Contenant les traités du droit français (Paris: Pichon-Béchat, 1827),
447.—Trans.]
15. Jean-Marie Pardessus, Cours de droit commercial, vol. 2 (Paris: Garnery,
1814), 303.
16. [It is unclear if Ewald is citing the original text, published in René-
Josué Valin, Nouveau commentaire sur l’ordonnance de la marine du mois

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 143

 d’août 1681: Avec des explications prises de l’esprit du texte et des notes his-
toriques et critiques, vol. 2 (La Rochelle: Chez Jerôme Legier, 1766), 77; or a
later version, such as Pierre Sanfourche-Laporte, Le nouveau Valin, ou Code
Commercial maritime (Paris: Aux archives du droit français, 1809), 476. In
either case, he modified the text.—Trans.]
17. [The quotation likely comes from Robert Joseph Pothier, Traité du
contrat d’assurance de Pothier: Avec un discours préliminaire, des notes et
un supplément (Marseille: Chez Sube et Laporte, 1810), 105. Pothier’s text
reads, “je ne peux pas valablement convenir avec quelqu’un qu’il se chargera
des fautes que je commettrai; ce serait une convention qui inviterait ad delin-
quendum” (I cannot plausibly agree with someone that he will be responsible
for all the faults I may commit; this kind of agreement would encourage
delinquency).—Trans.]
18. [Balthazard-Marie Emerigon, Traité des assurances et des contrats à la
grosse (Marseille: Jean Mossy, 1783), 364.—Trans.]
19. In other words, criminality is an insurable risk on the same basis as
any other accident. [See Adolphe Quetelet, Sur l’homme et le développement
de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale (Paris: Bachelier, 1835); translated
in English as Adolphe Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of
His Faculties, trans. R. Knox (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1842).—Trans.]
20. A. Frémery, Études de droit commercial (Paris: Alex-Gobelet, 1833),
cited by Louis Pouget, Dictionnaire des assurances terrestres (Paris: A. Durand,
1855), s.v. “faute” and “faute lourde.”
21. Eugène Persil, Traité des assurances terrestres (Paris: Gobelet, 1835),
25–26.
22. Alfred de Courcy, Des assurances (Paris: Comité de publications poli-
tiques, 1886), 22.
23. [This claim by Charles Bonaventure Marie Toullier is cited by M.D.
Dalloz in “Assurances terrestres,” in Jurisprudence générale du royaume:
Répertoire méthodique et alphabétique de législation de doctrine et de juris-
prudence, vol. 5 (Paris: Bureau de la jurisprudence générale du royaume,
1846), 356.—Trans.]
24. Jean-Marie Pardessus, Assurance contre les accidents de voiture:
Consultation (Paris: Impr. A. Guyot et Scribe, 1860), 16.
25. [Charles Bonaventure Marie Toullier and J.-B. Duvergier, Le droit civil
français suivant l’ordre du code, vol. 6 (Paris: F. Cotillon, 1846), 149.]
26. [Ewald is referring to the economist Denis Kessler’s work at the
Fédération française des sociétés d’assurances (FFSA, the French Federation of
Insurance Companies). From 1990 to 1997 and 1998 to 2002, Kessler served as
president of this organization, which represents the interests of almost all of the
insurance companies operating in the French insurance market.—Trans.]
27. [Mutuelles 45, also known as les mutuelles, refers to nonprofit partner-
ship companies, particularly in the health sector, governed by the 1945 Code
of Mutuality, in which member contributions are not priced according to
individual risk, as opposed to both insurance corporations and mutual insur-
ance companies governed by the Insurance Code.—Trans.]
28. Albert Chauffon, Les assurances: Leur passé, leur présent, leur avenir,
vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie A. Marescq Aine A. Chevalier-Marescq, 1884), 296.
29. [Cited in François Ewald, L’état providence (Paris: Grasset, 1986), 183 and
192 n. 19, as Louis Richard, L’homme est un capital (Paris, 1866), 7–8.—Trans.]
30. [Richard, 7–8.—Trans.]
31. [William Petty, Political Arithmetick, or a Discourse Concerning,
the Extent and Value of Lands, People, Buildings; Husbandry, Manufacture,
Commerce, Fishery, Artizans, Seamen, Soldiers; Publick Revenues, Interest,
Taxes, Superlucration, Registries, Banks; Valuation of Men, Increasing of
Seamen, of Militia’s, Harbours, Situation, Shipping, Power at Sea, &c. (London:
Printed for Robert Clavel, 1690).—Trans.]
32. Laurent Thirouin, Le hasard et les règles, le modèle du jeu dans la

144 Grey Room 74

pensée de Pascal (Paris: J. Vrin, 1991), 125.
33. [Adolphe Thiers, Rapport général presente par m. Thiers, au nom de la
Commission de l’assistance et de la prévoyance publiques, dans la séance du
26 janvier 1850 (Brussels: Société typographique Belge, 1850), 10–11.—Trans.]
34. The first obligation was promulgated in 1910 with the law on the
retirement of workers and peasants.
35. Edmond About, L’assurance (Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1865),
[34–35].
36. [Eugène Reboul, Assurances sur la vie (Paris: Dubuisson, 1863), 40.
—Trans.]
37. [About, 35–36.—Trans.]
38. [About, 54–55.—Trans.]
39. [Ewald is likely referring to Albert Chaufton, Les assurances, leur passé,
leur présent, leur avenir au point de vue rationnel, technique et pratique,
moral, économique et social, financier et administratif, legal, législatif et
contractuel, en France et à l’étrange (Paris: Librairie A. Marescq Ainé, 1884),
291.—Trans.]
40. [Reboul, 70.—Trans.]
41. [France has two main types of insurance: that offered by insurance
companies and by mutuals. Mutuals are not-for-profits and, because they
depend only on the contributions of their members, are considered part of
what the French would call the “social” or “solidarity” economy.—Eds.]
42. [Ewald is possibly referring to Frédéric Bastiat, “Solidarity,” in
Harmonies of Political Economy (1850), pt. 2, trans. Patrick James Stirling
(Edinburgh: Olivery and Boyd, 1870), 174–180.—Trans.]
43. Eugène Reboul, Assurances sur la vie (Paris: Dubuisson, 1863), 44.
44. [Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International
Publishers, 1970).—Trans.]
45. [John Rawls, “The Principles of Justice,” in A Theory of Justice, rev. ed.
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47–101.—Trans.]
46. “Law is the expression of the general will; every citizen has the right
to participate personally or through their representative in its formation;
it must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes; all citizens, being
equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible for all public dignities, and
admissible to all public positions and employments, according to their
capacity and without distinction other than their virtues and talents.”
47. “For the maintenance of the public force and administrative expenses,
a common contribution is indispensable. It must be equally distributed
among all citizens in proportion to their means.”
48. Art. 225-3 of the new penal code.
49. [Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, trans. and
ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966).—Trans.]
50. [Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol.
19, The Ego and the Id and Other Works (1923–1925) (London: Vintage, 2001),
235–239.—Trans.]
51. Code of Professional Ethics appended to the Convention of Insurability
of HIV-Positive Individuals of 1991.
52. “To have the courage to know.” With this phrase Kant begins
“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Berlinische Monatsschrift,
1784, 481–94.
53. In the beginning of the twentieth century, accusations launched against
the immorality of insurance were renewed. According to Georges Duhamel:
“I understand that to a number of my contemporaries, insurance currently
takes the place of conscience, guardian angel, honor, gratitude, and many
other things as well. . . . Insurance will pay. That is the magic formula that
sums up the act of faith, the act of hope, and the act of contrition.” From
Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Fayard, 1934), 100.

Ewald | The Values of Insurance 145

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