Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes life insurance to be a signifier of how liberal life operates. It assumes liberal life to be an outcome of technological practices such as life insurance through which the principle of the acquisitive spirit of individuals can take place. The book expresses that life insurance performs a technological agency in making liberal life possible. It explains that life insurance contributes to the transcendence of liberalism by producing three conditions. First, it produces subjectivities that stabilise human being into an indivisible and responsible self. Second, it produces time, the temporal framework on which uncertainty is to be managed as risk. And third, it produces markets of security as the instruments through which it governs the behaviour of individuals and collectives.