Just how Americans are supposed to face the personal risks that life inevitably entails has become the dominant political issue of our time. The chief domestic policy issue in last fall’s presidential election was medical risk: whether to require all citizens to carry health-care insurance; and if so, who should provide it; and above all, how to pay for it. The risks inherent in old age and the anxieties about Social Security and Medicare, the government’s two most important programs for helping citizens to manage them, are sure to drive the debate in at least the next few elections. In time, the transfer of private retirement risk from our large corporations to their individual employees, achieved by the almost universal shift from traditional defined-benefit pensions to 401(k) plans and other defined-contribution vehicles, will also take center stage.

Like people everywhere, Americans have always faced the risks to which daily life exposes them. And as in industrial and post-industrial societies elsewhere, the substance of these risks has changed over time, not just with advances in medical technology (citizens of high-income countries now take for granted recovery from diseases from which their grandparents were resigned to die) but with the evolving economy, too. The risk to income and livelihood is different when the majority of the workforce is employed by large firms than when most people earned their living from family farms. It also differs when a large and growing share of a country’s jobs is subject to the forces of global competition.

But American attitudes toward risk and risk-taking have been different from those in other countries. As Tocqueville observed nearly two centuries ago, taking on personal risk in America has always been bound up with fundamental notions of freedom and independence. This deep ideological connection has resonated well, at least in principle, with many of the major transitions in our country’s past: westward expansion, initially led by pioneering new farmland; the emancipation of the South’s nearly four million slaves; the early years of American industrialization, initially spurred by the small-scale efforts of individual inventors and entrepreneurs; and the more recent reprise of that experience in the explosion of Silicon Valley electronics.

But American attitudes toward risk and risk-taking have been different from those in other countries.

Other aspects of the American experience, such as the emergence of mass production carried out by large-scale corporations, have been more problematic from this perspective. But mass employment is hardly limited to the now-vanishing industrial sector. Today more than one million people work at Wal-Mart, and half of the country’s private-sector labor force works for firms with more than five hundred employees. The recent financial crisis has thrown up new troublesome questions about economic risk-bearing, including the extent to which the banks that the government saved have now, for practical purposes, evolved into public utilities.

In Against the Gods, one of the classics of historical financial writing for a broad audience, the late Peter Bernstein recounted the conceptual origins and early implementation of Western ideas of risk-sharing. The action in Bernstein’s story began in earnest in the seventeenth century in Europe, where mathematicians such as Pascal and Fermat, followed soon after by Bernoulli, first conceived what we today regard as modern probability theory. They did so in the first instance as an intellectual endeavor, but once the relevant concepts were in place, insurance—also in the modern sense—became possible. By the 1660s, Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse in London had emerged as a central exchange for merchants insuring commercial seagoing ventures.