This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification,...