Une question de justice ? Réforme « assurancielle » et tradition mutualiste au québec (1890-1910)

<p>Historians believe that the reform of the mutualist movement through the introduction of modern insurance practices helped strengthen the mutual societies that appeared in the nascent working-class communities trapped in a highly precarious economic environment. By repeating the discourse of the reformers of the period, historians have missed the fact that the reform of the mutualist movement did not simply clean up unprofessional and inadequate insurance practices, it also swept under the carpet an original response to the problems of social solidarity that profoundly affected the working class. Contrary to France, where the mutualist movement developed without government supervision, the mutualist experience in Quebec allows this hypothesis to be presented. The insurance reform cannot be reduced to a set of morally neutral technical issues. It raised a profound question about fairness that touches upon the very nature of social solidarity in democratic societies. At the expense of collective self-regulation, bureaucratic rationalization imposed a process of individuation at the start of the 20th century which ended with mutual insurance companies no longer binding members together among themselves but rather binding policy-holders individually and serially to a central administration.</p>