Risk, culture, and control

Some people think the world is wildly unpredictable, and are glad insurance can handle the risk and uncertainty they face. Other people believe their destiny is written in the stars, and consult a daily horoscope to reveal what is in store for them.

Either way, Caley Horan has the history of these things covered.

Horan, an associate professor in MIT’s history program, studies multiple topics related to how we handle uncertainty in modern American life. Her award-winning first book, “Insurance Era,” published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press, examined a deep tension: Insurance is a collective endeavor in certain respects but is defined in individual terms, at least by the private sector.

“I realized there was a story about insurance in the second half of the 20th century that people hadn’t really written,” Horan says. “It became important to me to tell that story, and to think about both the welfare state and private insurance.”

Currently Horan is in the midst of book project tackling another unwritten story: how astrology became a thoroughly modern, commercialized, and American pastime.

That might seem like quite a departure, but actually, Horan says, her history of astrology grew out of studying insurance history. The connecting tissue is how people themselves view uncertainty, risk, and the future.

“The forms of astrology that evolved in the U.S. over the course of the 20th century turned away from chance, which insurance seeks to cover, and instead offered a theory of causation rooted in external natural phenomena,” Horan says. “The celestial bodies and movements of stars and planets are seen as determining forces, rather than the chance-based world of risk. This creates a clear sense of causation, and of time as cyclical rather than progressing. There’s a real appetite for that.”

In both cases, Horan is uncovering how some familiar aspects of contemporary life have taken their current forms.

“The fact that everything has a history is what drew me to history as a field,” Horan says. “It’s tremendously important to have a sense of the past, and I find it endlessly interesting and exciting.”

For her research and teaching, Horan was granted tenure at MIT last year.

An open field

Horan, who grew up in Colorado, attended Stanford University, where she was a defender on the soccer team while completing a double major in history and feminist studies.

“I settled on history because it seemed like a really open field,” Horan says. “You can study anything historically. If you want to study film, art, or if you want to study insurance or astrology, you can do so as a historian.”

Horan received her BA from Stanford in 2003, then attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where she settled on the history of insurance as her dissertation topic and earned her PhD in 2011. She joined the MIT faculty in 2015, while working to turn her thesis into her first book.

In “Insurance Era,” Horan scrutinized high-level political dynamics as the private insurance industry sought to limit the New Deal-era expansion of the public safety net, which it regarded as a threat to its business. Horan also studied this with the lens of a cultural historian, looking at how industry advertising, for instance, portrays the decision to acquire insurance as a highly individualistic endeavor, a matter of personal prudence and savvy.

Ultimately “Insurance Era” received critical acclaim, winning the 2022 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history, and it has just been published in a new paperback edition.

Astrology and the self

At the moment, Horan is researching and writing her history of astrology — or at least the modern American version of the practice. Earlier in America, what might be called “natural astrology” appeared in almanacs with forecasts about things like the best time to plant crops, as “part of an economy that had a very agrarian nature,” Horan says.

But that economy changed, and so did astrology: Going back a bit more than century, astrology became focused on the self, and became a viable business all by itself.

“The astrology that we know today in the United States is very recent,” Horan says. “A lot of what we might today call the therapeutic nature of astrology, which is focused on the self and self-knowledge and self-understanding, is a late 19th-century development. By the 20th century, astrology becomes commercialized and part of a capitalist economy.”

Newspaper horoscope columns, for instance, date to 1930, along with the invention of “sun-sign” astrology, divided by birth dates.

“I think modern astrology has offered people, and continues to offer people, an interpretive framework for understanding identity, self, and relationships to others,  at a time when matters of work and identity have been up for grabs,” Horan says.

For her part, Horan’s own sense of identity as a historian is well-established, even as her work evolves: She will continue to pursue topics combining modern business, self-identity, uncertainty, and even health, studying those things in commercial and cultural terms. After she finishes her work on astrology in America, Horan intends to start writing about caregiver work, a growing part of the U.S. economy. And, she says, she continues to follow developments in insurance closely, with a return to that topic possible as well.

“I do feel some of the big-picture issues I have raised about insurance are very relevant,” Horan says. “That includes issues about the power we accord to private industry, how we think about collective organization, how Americans think about data and who controls their data, and how society distributes its resources, including basic insurance coverage. I think we’re heading into uncharted territory with some of these matters, and I do hope some of the questions I’ve raised continue to inform the way scholars are thinking about them.”