Social insurance displaced religion and family as primary risk-bearing institutions

Evidence

The new types of collective mutuality that were expressed by social insurance in the post-Depression years even threatened the established moral and symbolic purchase of religion and family as pillars of shouldering burdens and thus of managing risk. Life insurance, in particular, turned the uncertainties of life into opportunities for social enrichment, while propelling “collective self-governance and civil society” (Zelizer 1979, 93). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 273

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School reading on religion and culture as earlier pillars of social-constitution; also parallels the midwifery/community-bearing themes in A Midwife’s Tale from the reader’s fiction library. — connects to: Early US anti-welfare arguments framed socialized risk as destroying family moral solidarity — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 219