INSURANCE, RISK AND THE LIMITS OF SENTIMENTAL REPRESENTATION

John O'Brien

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2011, vol. 4, issue 3, 285-299

Abstract: The financial crisis that began in late 2008 and the centrality of corporate entities such as AIG and instruments such as the credit default swap exposes the extent to which the economy depends on systems that we can broadly define as ‘insurance’. But the brief prominence of insurance in the crisis underscores how this technology is more typically an invisible actor in the economy. Taking insurance as a problem of representation, this essay investigates what the author calls, following Raymond Williams, the sentimental ‘structure of feeling’ that has since the eighteenth century permeated cultural understands of the economic. Using as case studies the public-sphere discourse around the near-collapse of the insurance conglomerate AIG in fall 2008 and the role of insurance in Tobias Smollett's 1751 novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, the author argues that insurance exposes the continuing sentimentality of economic relationships.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2011.586850 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:4:y:2011:i:3:p:285-299

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJCE20

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2011.586850

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().