Book Review: Review Essay: Rethinking Welfare and the Politics of Risk

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231194729
• Author: Roni Hirsch
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(6) 1008 –1027

© The Author(s) 2023

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1. Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Yascha Mounk, The Age of

Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2017); William MacAskill, “Normative Uncertainty as a Voting

Problem,” Mind, 125, no. 500 (2016): 967–1004.

2. Emily C. Nacol, Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Review Essay: Rethinking Welfare and the Politics of Risk

Probable Justice: Risk, Insurance, and the Welfare State, by Rachel Z. Friedman.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 272pp.

Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America by

Caley Horan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 264pp.

Reviewed by: Roni Hirsch, School of Political Sciences, Haifa University, Israel

DOI: 10.1177/00905917231194729

The coronavirus pandemic has profoundly shaken the fundamental paradigms

of political economy. In the years to come, we will discover it has changed how

we think the economy runs and the role we see in it for democratic govern-

ments. Along with the 2008 financial crisis and ongoing climate emergency, it

has also prompted a broad rethinking of the way societies manage and allocate

risks. As COVID-19 relief efforts poured down in multiple new forms and vari-

eties—from personal checks signed by the president to unprecedented fed-

funded business loans and a highly uneven global vaccination campaign—they

have forced us to evaluate traditional institutions of relief and aid and to reflect

on the very meaning of security and solidarity. None is more prominent than

the welfare state itself and its core institution: social insurance.

The political theory of risk, however, has so far remained a more minor

and fragmented occupation, one that can be roughly divided into three groups:

normative work on chance, responsibility, and moral uncertainty;1 historical

work on the role of risk in canonical political thought;2 and work on risk as a

1194729PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231194729Political TheoryBook Reviews

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