The premise of this volume is that an exploration of some of the different ways in which unemployment has been problematized can furnish us with important insights about social governance. This study is also motivated by the claim that valuable insights about governance are possible through focusing attention at the level of the technical, at the means by which issues are rendered governable. Since the evolution of unemployment policy has been narrated many times in terms of the history of ideas, then a study which traces changes at the level of governmental techniques is timely.

Such a project would obviously be radically incomplete without a consideration of the place of social insurance within the history of governing unemployment. Accordingly, this chapter covers the same time period (roughly the 1890s to 1914) as the previous two, when public debate was grappling for appropriate models to visualize the nature of unemployment, and to devise mechanisms for addressing it. Whereas the previous chapter highlighted the labour exchange, this one examines the effects of the deployment of unemployment insurance. To put it another way, it is about governing unemployment as a risk.

The objectives of the chapter are threefold. First, it will try to demonstrate that the advent of social insurance consolidates a sociological as opposed to a moral perception of the nature of unemployment. It does this by governing unemployment as a ‘risk’, as a probability pertaining to a given population just like mortality, sickness, injury, etc.