This paper starts from the assumption that the prevailing discourse on social security needs reconsideration. The selection of the discourse is always crucial, as it has important implications for the social policy pursued, including its institutional arrangements. The paper advocates that social policy, as a whole, can fundamentally be based on a general insurance discourse, thus providing an understanding of social security that differs from approaches based on social assistance and mere income redistribution. It is also claimed that this approach, emphasizing a risk-centred concept of social security and a well-established legal, actuarial and institutional framework, is capable of dealing with the various pressures on social security created by globalization. The issues of the insurance principle in social security were discussed in this journal, but at a more practical level and from a different perspective, in the paper by Kessler (1999). The features of the approach suggested are discussed from the point of view of contributory and non-contributory schemes, civil society, commercial and mutual insurance, individual and social risks, public goods theory and the concept of civil liability. This paper contains a modified presentation of some ideas put forward in an earlier paper presented at a research conference of the International Social Security Association held in Helsinki in September 2000 (Forss, Kalimo and Purola, 2000).
