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Governing through risk and uncertainty

Richard Ericson

To cite this article: Richard Ericson (2005) Governing through risk and uncertainty, Economy and
Society, 34:4, 659-672, DOI: 10.1080/03085140500277310

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Economy and Society Volume 34 Number 4 November 2005: 659
/672

Review article by Richard Ericson

Governing through risk and

uncertainty

Richard Ericson
Text reviewed

Pat O’Malley (2004) Risk, Uncertainty and Government , London: Glasshouse

Press.

In this book Pat O’Malley explores the genealogy of liberal government and
how it has made use of risk and uncertainty. Government refers to the practical
ideas and techniques through which state and non-state entities
/ institutions,
organizations, communities and individuals
/ seek to understand, govern, and
change their worlds. Liberal government is based on a commitment to
freedom, defined as uncensored action taken by a rationally calculating entity
addressing an indeterminate yet knowable future
Liberal commitment to freedom entails two connected paradoxes. First, in
struggling to configure the probable consequences of their action, entities
require knowledge of risk and engage in risk assessment. Risk assessment is
rarely based on perfect knowledge, and typically frays into uncertainty.
Uncertainty frequently leads entities to hunker down, engage in risk avoidance,
and limit the freedom of others in the name of security. Paradoxically,
uncertainty is also a source of freedom. It creates room for the imaginative
production of better and more useful knowledge of risk, and ultimately for
more rational and responsible decisions. Uncertainty is also a source of creative
enterprise, a feature that is especially dear to liberalism given its emphasis on
wealth creation and attendant promotion of market uncertainty as a kind of
freedom. Thus liberalism imagines and governs the indeterminate future
through uncertainty as well as risk. There is perpetual tension between the
modernist desire for greater certainty through knowledge of risk, and the
entrepreneurial desire for uncertainty as an engine of enterprise.

Richard Ericson, Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, Room 8001
/ 130 St

George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H1, Canada. E-mail: richard.ericson@utoronto.ca

Copyright 2005 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140500277310
660 Economy and Society

The second and connected paradox, articulated most brilliantly by Isaiah

Berlin (1969), is that liberalism must curtail freedom in order to promote
conditions in which freedom can flourish. Liberal government is not only
perpetually engaged in juggling risk and uncertainty for freedom, but also
freedom and restriction for security. This book examines how this juggling act
has been performed through three types of liberalism in the modern era:
classical liberalism, social liberalism, and neo-liberalism.
O’Malley’s conceptualization of risk and uncertainty varies at different
stages of the book, a point of criticism to which I shall return. Distilling his
approach to risk, it is probabilistic knowledge that is often but not necessarily
statistical. O’Malley’s concern is not whether such knowledge in a given case
actually provides objective knowledge as a capacity for action in the future.
Risk is not something to be treated analytically as real or unreal. Rather, it is a
way in which liberal governments render realities in order to govern. As such,
it is highly variable in both form and content. Realities are rendered by expert
discourses and techniques for handling risk that present choices to entities
about how to approach the future. Expert techniques and discourses also assign
entities to risk categories that variously place them in inclusive risk pools and
solidarities of fate but also exclude others and create divisions among them.
Uncertainty is also treated analytically as something that is neither real nor
unreal, but as a way in which liberal governments render reality in order to
govern. Thus uncertainty is not regarded as vague speculation on the possible,
murky futures, incalculability, or only applicable to the individual special case.
Rather, it is a set of discourses and techniques that make demands on entities
to exercise their foresight in enterprising ways and thereby achieve freedom.
O’Malley observes that social scientists have been preoccupied with risk and
therefore have rarely focused on uncertainty. His thoroughly liberal project is
to correct this imbalance, especially as it can be seen in some forms of legal
governance where, he argues, governmental reasoning has been based much
more on uncertainty than risk. Contract law and tort law in particular have
used pragmatic and situated forms of uncertain knowledge
/ ‘foreseeability’,
‘reasonable foresight’, ‘expectation’
/ rather than risk calculations that
promise predictability.
O’Malley documents that risk and uncertainty have been central to liberal
government for centuries. At the same time he is careful to show that the
development and deployment of risk and uncertainty in different eras, under
different liberalisms, has varied enormously: ‘government does not stand in
one place for too long’ (p. 173). The emphasis is on contingency, accident,
invention, and shifting sands in the use of risk and uncertainty by liberal
governments historically and transnationally. As O’Malley states in concluding
the book, ‘we can always govern ourselves in other ways. Freedom is no more
given by uncertainty than it is taken away by risk’ (p. 181).
O’Malley positions his work against two schools of social thought, both of
which treat risk and uncertainty as the effects of inescapable logics, in
particular modernity and capitalism. This positioning is a predictable move
 Richard Ericson: Governing through risk and uncertainty 661

from a writer who uses the governmentality perspective because that

perspective eschews anything that seems to smack of grand theory, macro-
analysis and structural determinism.
One school, exemplified by the risk society theory of Ulrich Beck (1992,
1999), argues that we live in a world of uncontrollable dangers beyond
conventional risk calculation. Beck should have called it the uncertain society
because his focus is on potential and actual scientific and technological
disasters that have proven unpredictable and entail immeasurable human
suffering. This deployment of uncertainty creates a doomsday cult that
O’Malley sees as disastrous. On the one hand, when asked what to do about an
event, process, or state of affairs that is too uncertain, members of this school
respond that more research and development is required. More science and
technology will work where less has not. This response is paradoxical, given
that it is science and technology that are supposed to have gotten us into
trouble in the first place. On the other hand, members of this school also
advocate the precautionary principle: if in doubt about a risky activity with
potential for severe consequences, pre-empt it through heavy preventive and
regulatory efforts and, if that fails, ban it altogether. One should even exercise
pre-caution, being cautious about how caution is being exercised. At this
extreme, the precautionary principle yields paralysis, undercutting risk-taking
as the basis of liberal enterprise, innovation, and wealth creation.
Risk-taking as an engine of liberal enterprise, innovation, and wealth
creation is precisely what is celebrated by the second school, exemplified in the
work of Peter Bernstein (1998). While the first school uses uncertainty to
promote overwhelming pessimism and prevent descent into chaos, the second
school uses it as a source of optimism and argues that we can thrive on chaos.
The real threat is any view that sees uncertainty as a threat, rather than as
something to be embraced for pleasure and profit. In this deployment of
uncertainty, risk as statistical calculation of frequency and severity gives way to
risk as threat and opportunity. As insurers and other traffickers in security
products know only too well, there is money to be made from uncertainty and
the emotions that flow from it (Ericson and Doyle 2004a, 2004b).
O’Malley treats both of these schools of thought as part of what he is
analysing from the governmentality perspective: political discourses that are
intended to evoke specific practices in relation to risk and uncertainty. In other
words, they are simply part of the variability in liberal discourses and
techniques employed in government through risk and uncertainty. It is this
variability that O’Malley proceeds to document through the series of essays
that form the substantive chapters of the book.
In chapters 2 and 3, O’Malley tells his story of how the three liberalisms
/
classical, social, and neo-
/ have approached government through risk and
uncertainty. Classical liberalism was intent on creating a society free of the
shackles of top-down governmental decrees and moral economy. Its vision was
to govern through contractual relationships that facilitate free markets and
wealth accumulation. Uncertainty was seen as fundamental to the human
662 Economy and Society

condition: not only the way the world is, but also what spurs people to action.
People’s wants in the face of uncertainty motivate them to have foresight and
be prudent, to work hard and be productive. These rationalities of classical
liberalism fostered a culture of self-denial and defensive security. Leading
theorists such as Bentham (1962) promoted efforts to guard against potentially
destructive forces through everyday sacrifices that would save resources for a
rainy day. This self-denial would yield freedom in the form of security. The
institutions fostered in this culture included life insurance as an exercise in
prudence and provider of security. The law of contract was also a core
institution. It sought to make the future more calculable while leaving an
opening for entrepreneurs to profit through uncertainty. It also reinforced the
culture of classical liberalism by making ‘reasonable foresight’ a legally
enforceable duty that would protect both the prudent individual and others.
Its approaches in this regard subsequently influenced other forms of law,
especially tort law and its conceptions of accidents and negligence.
Social liberalism emerged in the late nineteenth century as an approach to
abolishing want. As such it sought to get rid of particular forms of risk and
uncertainty. It was not a radical break from classical liberalism because it still
emphasized the independence of individual entities as the locus of freedom.
Independence was to be achieved by redistributing exposure to uncertainty
across the population. Risk spreading was also intended to create a more just
and efficient competitive market. Social liberalism was given an impetus by the
new culture of consumption that emerged after the Second World War.
Leading reformers such as Beveridge (1942) recognized the need to address
risks posed by freedom of contract and to distribute the purchasing power of
wage earners through good times and bad. Insurance remained central to social
liberalism, but now it included more state involvement, ranging from
compulsory state schemes for social security and pensions to joint schemes
with, and more regulation of, private insurers. State-run schemes were still
contributory and in that respect retained the virtues of prudence and
independence characteristic of classical liberalism. Social liberalism was
made possible by modernist rationalities and techniques, notably statistical
laws of large numbers and risk pooling, but also professional clinical expertise
to treat the many new maladies invented by modernism. These rationalities
and techniques were directed at promoting freedom of individuals, and in that
respect also there was furtherance of the classical liberal emphasis on
individualism.
O’Malley provides a number of examples of how social liberalism remained
connected to classical liberalism. Even at its pinnacle, the welfare state
included networks of non-state institutions. For example, in many jurisdictions
workers’ compensation schemes were overseen by the state but actually
provided through private insurance companies and private-sector service
providers. Tort law developed as an instrument for distributing the costs of
harms socially, and in that respect became insurantial. For example, in
products liability cases responsibility was attributed to the party with the
 Richard Ericson: Governing through risk and uncertainty 663

deepest pockets regardless of fault, meaning that manufacturers and insurers

footed the bill. O’Malley counters the dominant view of Atiyah (1979, 1998)
and others who argue that the stronger the social liberalism, the weaker the
market relations. O’Malley argues that all social liberal regimes kept market
uncertainty in play through mechanisms such as anti-trust laws, trade practice
laws, and minimum wage laws as an alternative to unemployment insurance in
markets with chronic labour shortages.
Neo-liberalism marks a return to greater emphasis on uncertainty. O’Malley
argues that this emphasis on uncertainty, especially an uncertain world of
market-based competition, is much stronger than under classical liberalism. In
the era of classical liberalism only members of the business elite were given
licence to be free-wheeling entrepreneurs, but now everyone is to seek freedom
through entrepreneurship. Even liberalism itself is ‘enterprised’, that is, used
to constitute a world in which every activity is seen as risk-taking in an
environment of competitive uncertainty. For example, neo-liberal gurus such
as Anthony Giddens (1998, 1999) proclaim that the greater the uncertainty, the
greater the opportunity for innovation and profit. This rhetoric is used in
strong reaction to those aspects of social liberalism that are said to give too
much privilege to risk reduction and risk spreading at the expense of
enterprising uncertainty.
Neo-liberalism seeks to transform risk from being a technique of
social security provision to a responsibility to be assumed by self-
governing entities. In this transformation, the liberal state is to serve first
and foremost as a facilitator and enabler of entrepreneurial risk-taking. At the
level of the individual, the emphasis is no longer on the classical liberal
prudence and self-discipline, nor on acceptance of the social liberal ‘national
minimum’ of security provision, but rather on self-fulfilment through
enterprise and consumption. Self-esteem through designing a personal
‘lifestyle’ is promoted, and with it new duties, including a duty to be well
/
a fit and able liberal subject
/ and a duty to choose among a bewildering array
of consumption alternatives. At the same time, there is an emphasis on
responsible risk-taking, which requires entities to learn to choose among
appropriate risk management techniques that will yield security and prosperity.
In this respect at least, there is a new prudentialism as well as a new
adventurism embedded in neo-liberal governance. But such risk management
is seen as conducive to enterprise, and in sharp contrast to the docile bodies
envisaged by the risk management practices of classical liberalism or the
national minimum standard of well-being envisaged by the risk management
practices of social liberalism.
In chapter 4, entitled ‘Uncertainty, liberalism and contract’, O’Malley
analyses the development of common law, and in particular contract law, as a
source of how decisions and technologies of uncertainty have shaped liberal
governance. Using secondary sources (e.g. Daston 1988; Hacking 1990), he
outlines the emergence of mathematical probability and associated key
concepts such as ‘expectations’ and the ‘reasonable man’. Comparisons are
664 Economy and Society

made with similar concepts in the emergence of common law. However, law did
not embrace the statistical project and its focus on the distributional norm.
Rather, it stayed with the classical probabilism project of articulating moral
norms as criteria of individual competence in dealing with uncertainty. Law
sought ‘rules derived from an imaginary of entrepreneurial calculation that is
pragmatic and situational, rather than abstract or quantifiable’ (p. 92). The
focus became ‘reasonable foresight’, which required figurative reasoning, or
reasoning by analogy, based on experience. The law of contract exemplifies this
approach, and as such is ‘at the conceptual heartland of liberalism’. For
example, the law of contract is used to take into account uncertainties such as
changes in market prices in order to protect commodity producers from price
fluctuations and to stabilize markets. Government in this form entails
perpetual articulation of rules for the moral conduct of business in conditions
of uncertainty. These rules alter subjectivity because they assume and sanction
specific forms of reasoning about the uncertain future. The liberal subject of
contract law is more a subject of uncertainty than of risk, governed through a
regime of moral conduct about how to negotiate the future.
Chapter 5, ‘Gambling, speculation and insurance’, furthers the analysis of
contracts as a moral mechanism for allocating the risks of future events. A
comparison is made among contracts in insurance, stock market speculation
and gambling. Historically, gambling has been treated as what insurance and
the stock market are not: ‘the absent presence that not only haunts the margins
of contract law, but by its very existence has done much to create them’ (p. 95).
O’Malley argues that the central issue in distinguishing insurance, speculation,
and gambling has always been the effects on commerce. If the activity is
arguably of ‘real value’ and ‘for the good of commerce’ it is a legitimate
exchange, if not it is an ‘empty’ or ‘fictitious’ exchange treated as gambling.
Even today, in spite of the fact that gambling has become pervasive and
legitimate in many contexts, gambling contracts are still unenforceable at
common law unless they involve licensed members of the gaming industries.
The legitimacy of risky contracts has varied substantially in different liberal
regimes. At their inception, marine insurance and life insurance contracts
could be taken out by anyone as a speculative venture even if they did not have
an insurable interest in the property or life being insured. This practice was
eventually ruled illegal and the law changed because it represented an ‘empty’
contract for the sole purpose of personal financial gain rather than financial
protection of entities with an interest in what was insured. In the eighteenth
century, selling stocks not in one’s possession (‘difference contracts’) was
defined as illegal because it represented speculation for personal financial gain
(gambling) rather than serving market exchange and commerce. Such
restriction was gradually modified and eventually changed over the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth century, as futures contracts evolved as a
mechanism for regulating prices, protecting producers, and stabilizing
markets. Deemed ‘for the good of commerce’, these contracts ceased to be
in the realm of gambling and were moved into the realm of legitimate
 Richard Ericson: Governing through risk and uncertainty 665

speculation. O’Malley observes that under neo-liberalism there is a broad view

of what constitutes legitimate speculation. For example, difference contracts
are institutionalized in financial derivatives markets. Since 1996, the UK
Financial Services Authority has legalized financial spread betting on price
fluctuations on the share market through licensed betting agencies, such that
the distinction between betting and investment evaporates. Gambling is now
widespread in the form of lotteries, casinos, race tracks, and betting shops that
sell the thrill of risk-taking and the hope of windfalls. This expansion of
legitimate gambling is encouraged by neo-liberal governments seeking new
sources of revenue. These governments now depict gambling as a market
choice for the consumer of leisure activities, and as a productive industry that
is good for commerce because it creates jobs and enhances wealth.
In chapter 6, ‘Insurance, actuarialism and thrift’, O’Malley provides a
genealogy of life insurance as a window on the three liberalisms. He
demonstrates how insurance, which is explicitly in the business of converting
uncertainty into risk, is strongly influenced by the prevailing political
rationality. He traces the move in Britain from industrial life insurance based
in the ‘thrift’ of classical liberalism to the social insurances of social liberalism
that blended compulsory and voluntary thrift, to neo-liberal investment-based
life insurance products that have the potential for considerable loss as well as
gain and displace thrift. O’Malley shows that social insurance emerged as a
response to problems evident in industrial life insurance markets. The most
salient problems were overselling, high policy lapse rates, excessive adminis-
trative costs, and a disciplinary approach to financial security rather than one
that emphasizes the exercise of will. Beveridge (1942), as the most prominent
architect of social insurance, pointed to all of these problems in arguing that
life insurance ‘cannot be safely treated as an activity of commerce’. Beveridge
(1942) emphasized compulsory thrift for necessities, implemented through
contributory pension and other social security schemes designed to guarantee a
minimum standard of security regarding needs. He also left room for voluntary
thrift for ‘luxuries’, savings instruments that would allow consumers
eventually to purchase whatever reflected their wants. Both types of thrift
were to be achieved through a blend of state and private insurance instruments.
As part of mobilizing more individual responsibility for risk, neo-liberalism
created a context for the emergence of investment-based life insurance as a
means of individual wealth creation as well as protection. Protection has been
transformed into a consumer product with a peculiar blend of risk-taking and
risk management features. Through it the consumer can embrace risk with
hope for profit, encouraged by governments that are downsizing state
provision and promoting ‘private welfare’. In some respects, a classical liberal
approach to gaming has returned to insurance markets.
In chapters 7 and 8, O’Malley turns to an analysis of how risk and
uncertainty in liberal government are used in recent approaches to crime
control. The genealogical approach of earlier chapters, with an emphasis on
historical comparison, gives way to contemporary analysis of risk-based crime
666 Economy and Society

control techniques, with an emphasis on transnational comparison. In chapter

7, ‘Risk, crime control, and criminal justice’, O’Malley argues that risk-based
techniques for crime control vary according to the character of liberalism
favoured by political regimes and the resultant governance of social inclusion
and exclusion that they practise. In the present-day context, such variation can
be seen in how nation-states treat the victims of global restructuring of labour:
are victims categorized as the underclass and subject to exclusion and penal
incapacitation or are they candidates for welfare inclusion and empowerment?
While each nation-state operates with a blend of exclusionary and inclusionary
strategies, there are extremes. A more exclusionary approach is taken in the
United States, which uses ‘categorically exclusionary risk’ or ‘actuarial justice’
to create and risk manage the underclass. Categorically exclusionary risk is
evident in many aspects of American crime control, including the war on
drugs, Meagan’s laws, the death penalty, chain gangs, boot camps, and mass
warehousing of prisoners (approximately 6 million Americans are under penal
orders
/ prison, parole, and probation
/ at any given time).
To varying degrees, a more inclusionary and restorative justice approach is
taken in other countries, including Britain, France, Australia, and Canada.
Each of these countries retains elements of social liberalism in their crime
control policies and practices, including a significant place for welfare
institutions and professions. However, these institutions and professions
have had substantially to alter their rhetorical strategies and practices to fit
with expectations of emergent neo-liberal regimes. Most significantly, they
must now operate in the language of risk (risk assessment, risk management,
audit), experiment with new technologies of control (electronic bracelets,
satellite monitoring of offenders), and try to convince the most marginal
members of society that they too can be free liberal subjects if they learn to
make the right choices about how they conduct their lives.
Chapter 8, ‘Risking drug use’, examines the harm minimization approach to
drug use as an exemplification of this new liberal regime of crime risk
management. Drawing on the work of Valverde (1998), O’Malley observes
that, just like the alcoholic, the drug addict suffers from a ‘liberal affliction’: a
pathology entwined with the subject’s individual freedom to control their own
body and consume what they desire. To the extent that addiction is recognized
as a medical pathology, how is it possible to justify coercion of the subject,
whether it be coerced medical treatment or punishment aimed at making both
the subject and potential addicts just say no to drugs? The approach in the
United States is to demonize the drug user and be punitive: 60 per cent of
federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug-related offences, and the average
sentence for these offenders has doubled since the early 1990s. The approach
in Britain, and even more so in Australia, is focused on seeing the drug-taker as
a problem for which harm minimization is the solution. The rationalities of
drug-takers are enlisted through educational efforts to have them make
informed lifestyle choices about the use of drugs. This education includes
probabilistic models of risks associated with the use of particular drugs in
 Richard Ericson: Governing through risk and uncertainty 667

particular contexts. While there are safer drugs and contexts, there is also risk
of causing harm to others if drugs are used in the wrong context, for example
while driving or using machinery at work. When harm to others is likely, the
criminal sanction becomes a serious risk to the drug user. The strongest use of
the criminal sanction is reserved for suppliers of drugs, who are demonized as
traffickers.
This is an excellent book that brings together in one source many of
O’Malley’s diverse writings on the subject. Among the valuable contributions
is the unique approach to risk and uncertainty: as distinct and often competing
discourses of liberal government that strategically mobilize populations; and as
technologies of government that direct conduct in particular ways. The focus
on uncertainty is especially valuable because it remains an underdeveloped
concept in most academic literature including that in the governmentality
tradition.
The book also benefits from the genealogical approach that O’Malley uses so
skilfully. He shows convincingly that present-day concerns about risk society
and uncertainty have a long lineage, as do the numerous manifestations of
liberalism. Moreover, he demonstrates that liberal government, through its
uses of risk and uncertainty, has evolved in ways that are highly variable,
equivocal, uneven, and paradoxical. While classical liberalism, social liberal-
ism, and neo-liberalism are distinct enough to justify different labels, they
overlap as well as diverge in particular programmes of liberal government. I
especially like the conception of social liberalism because it indicates clearly
that social welfare, stretching to the boundaries of socialism, is still very much
a part of liberalism. O’Malley crafts his materials brilliantly to show, for
example, how social insurance schemes retain the contractualism of classical
liberalism, and how social welfare clinical expertise (e.g. social work,
psychology, psychiatry) still tries to retain the integrity of the autonomous
individual as the locus of reform and improvement. He is also adept at showing
that there can be very different responses to social problems by the same
government at a particular juncture. For example, at the present juncture in
Australia, the harm minimization approach directs moral responsibility and
attendant sanctions away from drug users, who are to be educated about their
choices, and towards the creators of harm, in particular drug traffickers as
harm producers. At the same time, with respect to gambling, moral
responsibility is directed away from the creators of harm
/ gambling
establishment operators and the governments who back them ‘for the good
of commerce’ and tax revenues
/ and towards the compulsive gambler, who is
pathologized and, if unamenable to ban orders and treatment, criminalized.
This book is also an important example of why security should be studied in
its broadest sense. Too often scholars in narrow specializations focus on
security only within the institutional spheres they study. For example,
criminologists tend to view security only in terms of crime prevention,
policing, and the criminal justice system. O’Malley demonstrates that liberal
governance through risk and uncertainty involves myriad forms of security
668 Economy and Society

provision
/ private insurance, investments markets, welfare provision,

practices in fitness and health, and crime control, to name a few
/ that all
intersect in the liberal constitution of security and freedom.
While I appreciate O’Malley’s novel treatment of risk and uncertainty as
discrete discourses and techniques, there are several problems with this
approach. For example, he uses the following quotation of Castel about
dangerous offenders to depict what constitutes uncertainty.
[Dangerousness] implies at once the affirmation of a quality immanent to the
subject (he or she is dangerous), and a mere probability, a quantum of
uncertainty, given that the proof of danger can only be provided after the fact,
should the threatened action actually occur. Strictly speaking there can only ever
be imputations of dangerousness, postulating the hypothesis of a more or less
probable relationship between certain present symptoms and a certain act to
come.
(Castel 1991: 283)
O’Malley then argues that, with the development of a scientific epistemology
of risk, it was possible in the case of dangerous offenders, and in dealing with
dangers generally, to get rid of uncertainty. ‘Uncertainty disappeared, to be
replaced by risk. The problem of imprecise or inaccurate prediction was
‘‘resolved’’ by rendering the underlying regularities probabilistic. Unpredicted
outcomes in particular cases became merely part of a probabilistic distribution’
(p. 17). But risk never makes uncertainty disappear. Probability statistics that
place the event, process, or state of affairs on a continuum of risk specify a
degree of unpredictability or ‘quantum of uncertainty’.
O’Malley’s differentiation of risk and uncertainty leads him to argue that
some political eras are more based in risk, while other eras are more based in
uncertainty. For example, contrary to conventional academic wisdom that the
contemporary neo-liberal era is one of risk
/ the risk society
/ O’Malley
depicts the era of social liberalism as more risk-based because it focused on
constituting populations through aggregate data for social security pro-
grammes. In contrast, the neo-liberal era places more emphasis on uncertainty.
In making this argument, O’Malley does not address the fact that there has
been a rise in risk discourse and practice in all institutional settings in the neo-
liberal era. This rise includes an expansion of databases on populations in the
private insurance industry, other financial institutions, and myriad contexts of
consumer profiling (Ericson et al . 2003; Ericson and Doyle 2004a; Turow
1997, 2005). It also includes the expansion of scientific knowledge of risk,
diffused through the mass media, Internet, educational establishments, clinical
settings, and expert services. Furthermore, there has been a proliferation of
risk-based technologies
/ ranging from pharmaceutical products to electronic
surveillance devices
/ marketed to the neo-liberal subject as a consumer of
approaches to self-government. Individual entities need, above all, knowledge
 Richard Ericson: Governing through risk and uncertainty 669

and technologies of risk to make the choices they are compelled to make as
neo-liberal subjects. This need becomes paramount in a regime that does
indeed stress uncertainty, a stress that can be coped with only through
knowledge of risk and its promise of competitive advantage in risk-taking,
pleasure, security, and freedom.
O’Malley also differentiates between risk and uncertainty in his legal
analyses. He presents the law of contract as the law of uncertainty: how to deal
with reasonably foreseeable outcomes through contract stipulations. On the
other hand, when he turns his attention to crime control, the emphasis is
almost exclusively on risk. This difference between contract law as the law of
uncertainty and criminal law as the law of risk is not subject to explanation or
analysis. A future direction for analysis regarding criminal law is the
‘criminalization of uncertainty’: how, in face of limited knowledge about
threats, criminalization
/ more legislation, intensified surveillance, lower due
process standards, and greater punishment
/ is too often the preferred
response. Governmental responses to terrorism post-9/11 provide the most
poignant examples, but I am suggesting a general tendency in many areas of
conduct to respond to uncertainty through more intensive criminalization
(Ericson 2005; Ericson, forthcoming).
In spite of the focus on government, there is relatively little emphasis on
politics as the study of power. This limitation is traceable to a governmentality
perspective that eschews analyses of structured inequality. Thus O’Malley fails
to address important topics such as the knowledge structure of society with
respect to risk and uncertainty and the inequalities in governance it produces.
For example, under the neo-liberal emphasis on risk-taking for competitive
advantage and wealth accumulation, one enormous competitive advantage is
knowledge of risk itself. As many ordinary consumers of stocks and mutual
funds have learned, insider knowledge about routine market operations can
greatly enhance the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. If neo-
liberalism has indeed transformed risk as frequency and severity into
uncertainty as threat and opportunity, when does opportunity slide into
opportunism based on a power imbalance in knowledge of risk? O’Malley says
that under neo-liberalism, everyone is ‘given license to consume in proportion
to their success’ (p. 71). In fact they are given licence to consume to excess.
There is now record overspending and debt in many countries, for example the
United States and United Kingdom. Private enterprise steps in to profit from
regulation of the many who fall into debt, for example through borrowing and
debt control schemes that charge extraordinary rates of interest
/ often several
hundred per cent per annum
/ and thereby create a class of chronic debtors.
O’Malley consistently avoids delving into these more troubling aspects of
liberal regimes that are blatantly unfair, restrict freedom, and as such are
illiberal. He examines in detail how and why social insurance, and later private
life insurance investment policies, were a response to the problems of
670 Economy and Society

industrial life insurance including overselling, lapse rates, fraud, and

administrative inefficiencies. However, he fails to consider how these newer
forms of insurance are riddled with the same problems, and in many cases
create even greater problems of injustice, inequality, and exclusion (Ericson et
al . 2000, 2003; Ericson and Doyle 2004a).
O’Malley also side-steps counter-examples that give credence to theorists
such as Beck, and Ewald (2002), who identify the reality of a precautionary
logic in contemporary society. The fear of harm to children is now so great that
precautionary measures are routine, to the point where we may be raising a
generation of risk avoiders rather than risk-takers. The extreme post-9/11
approaches to uncertainty indicate how catastrophes can fuel precautionary
measures that are long lasting, perhaps even permanent. Specialists in the
business of uncertainty, terrorists are adept at using modernization risks to
strike at the foundations of risk society and show that it is, at some level,
ungovernable.
Some of the literature O’Malley contests, in particular the work of Ulrich
Beck and his followers, is based in the sociology of science and technology.
O’Malley does not directly engage literature in this field, and as a consequence
makes some peculiar assertions. For example, he asserts that ‘[f]or the most
part, the appearance of major and potentially catastrophic risks has not given
rise to reflections about the limits of knowledge’ (p. 180). To the contrary, such
reflections are central to research in the sociology of science and technology.
They are also central to governments, NGOs, social movements, private
corporations, and insurers concerned about the potential catastrophic
consequences of the products of science and technology, for example nuclear,
biological, and chemical products. O’Malley also asserts that most aspects of
catastrophic risk and precaution are ‘largely outside the competence of any
sociological analytic’ (p. 180). This assertion ignores the centrality of
catastrophic risk and reaction to it in the sociology of science and technology
(e.g. Stehr and von Storch 1999, 2000; Ericson and Doyle 2004a, 2004b).
As mentioned earlier, O’Malley’s governmentality approach is based in a
social constructionist view of risk and uncertainty. ‘From a governmental
standpoint, risks and uncertainties are neither real nor unreal. Rather, they are
ways in which the real is imagined to be by specific regimes of government, in
order that it may be governed’ (p. 15). As Hacking (1999) argues, we must
always ask, ‘the social construction of what?’ Risks are real and vary
enormously. Governmental discourses and techniques make up risk and
uncertainty, and make us act under their descriptions. At the same time the
real nature of risks shapes governmental responses, including the types of
science, technology, and law mobilized to understand and act upon them
(Fisher 2003, 2004).
Risk, Uncertainty and Government is certain to be a lasting contribution to
scholarship. Through fine-grained historical and cross-cultural analyses, it
documents the central role of risk and uncertainty in different liberal regimes
over three centuries. It thereby casts new light on contemporary debates
 Richard Ericson: Governing through risk and uncertainty
concerning risk society. It also ensures that students of government will give
uncertainty its due as a concept of parallel significance to risk. In the academic
world of chaos over the meaning of risk, let us hope that more certainty will be
the happy result.
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** / / (1999) World Risk Society,
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Bentham, J. (1962) The Works of Jeremy
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Ericson, R., Barry, D. and Doyle, A.
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** / / (2005) ‘Cracking the code:

advertisers, anxiety and surveillance in

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Richard Ericson is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre of

Criminology, University of Toronto. He is also a Research Associate of the
Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics
and Political Science. From 1993 to 2003 he was Principal of Green College
and Professor of Law and Sociology, University of British Columbia.
His recent books include Risk and Morality (edited with Aaron Doyle,
2003), Insurance as Governance (with Aaron Doyle and Dean Barry, 2003),
Uncertain Business: Risk, Insurance and the Limits of Knowledge (with Aaron
Doyle, 2004), and The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility (edited with
Kevin Haggerty, 2005), all published by University of Toronto Press. He is
also the author of Crime, Risk and Uncertainty (Polity Press, forthcoming).