Includes bibliographical references and index.

Risk, insurance, and the social construction of responsibility / Tom Baker -- Beyond moral hazard : insurance as moral opportunity / Deborah Stone -- Embracing fatality through life insurance in eighteenth-century England / Geoffrey Clark -- Imagining insurance : risk, thrift, and life insurance in Britain / Pat O'Malley -- Insuring more, ensuring less : the costs and benefits of private regulation through insurance / Carol A. Heimer -- Rhetoric of risk and the redistribution of social insurance / Martha McCluskey -- Taking risks : extreme sports and the embrace of risk in advanced liberal societies / Jonathan Simon -- At risk of madness / Nikolas Rose -- The policing of risk / Richard V. Ericson and Kevin D. Haggerty -- The return of Descartes's malicious demon : an outline of a philosophy of precaution / François Ewald (translated by Stephen Utz).

For much of the twentieth century, industrialized nations addressed social problems, such as workers' compensation benefits and social welfare programs, in terms of spreading risk. But in recent years a new approach has emerged: using risk both as a way to conceive of and address social problems and as an incentive to reduce individual claims on collective resources. Embracing Risk explores this new approach from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second part examines how risk i.

Description based on print version record.