Equality, Risk and Responsibility: Dworkin on the Insurance Market.
Equality, Risk and Responsibility: Dworkin on the Insurance Market.
The concept of risk occupies centre-stage in debates about individual and social responsibilities and, within a broadly neo-liberal regime, the paradigmatic form of risk management is insurance. Nevertheless analysis of these recent shifts in welfare politics appears curiously disconnected from dominant trends of normative political theorizing. The rise of ‘insurance as government’ and ‘risk management as responsibility and opportunity’ has not obviously been addressed even by prominent liberal political theorists. Similarly the analysts of neo-liberalism have devoted little attention to tracing these concepts through the literature on political theory. This article seeks to remedy this disconnection, by showing how Ronald Dworkin – perhaps the foremost liberal theorist writing today – offers us an account of equality which foregrounds the apparatus of insurance, and represents the management of risk within the welfare system as both an opportunity and a responsibility. Furthermore, his account inherits many of the ambiguities and weaknesses of neo-liberal theory and redeploys them within the political theory of equality.
risk, responsibility, insurance, neo-liberalism, equality, Dworkin
451-473
Armstrong, Chris
2fbfa0a3-9183-4562-9370-0f6441df90d2
2005
Armstrong, Chris
2fbfa0a3-9183-4562-9370-0f6441df90d2
Armstrong, Chris
(2005)
Equality, Risk and Responsibility: Dworkin on the Insurance Market.
Economy and Society, 34 (3), .
(doi:10.1080/03085140500111915).
Abstract
The concept of risk occupies centre-stage in debates about individual and social responsibilities and, within a broadly neo-liberal regime, the paradigmatic form of risk management is insurance. Nevertheless analysis of these recent shifts in welfare politics appears curiously disconnected from dominant trends of normative political theorizing. The rise of ‘insurance as government’ and ‘risk management as responsibility and opportunity’ has not obviously been addressed even by prominent liberal political theorists. Similarly the analysts of neo-liberalism have devoted little attention to tracing these concepts through the literature on political theory. This article seeks to remedy this disconnection, by showing how Ronald Dworkin – perhaps the foremost liberal theorist writing today – offers us an account of equality which foregrounds the apparatus of insurance, and represents the management of risk within the welfare system as both an opportunity and a responsibility. Furthermore, his account inherits many of the ambiguities and weaknesses of neo-liberal theory and redeploys them within the political theory of equality.
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Published date: 2005
Keywords:
risk, responsibility, insurance, neo-liberalism, equality, Dworkin
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Local EPrints ID: 34919
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/34919
ISSN: 0308-5147
PURE UUID: 1ee72fe7-07d4-4341-abec-16738fa688b5
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Date deposited: 15 May 2006
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 03:47
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