The Form of Insurance

Insurance is a crucial institution whose socio-cultural improbability still awaits a convincing explanation within the social sciences. In this article, I explore the hypothesis that underlying this improbability is a dramatic change in social structures that, between the 14th and 19th centuries, gave rise to what we commonly refer to as ‘modern society’. More specifically, I deal with insurance as a form from two distinct yet complementary perspectives. On the one hand, I explore the structure of the insurance contract as a bilateral risk agreement and address the question of the unity of this difference. On the other hand, I explore the co-existence of functional equivalents of insurance in early modern society and propose a socio-evolutionary approach to explaining the success of insurance as a business based on actuarial calculations.