Bougen's analysis of catastrophe insurance has considerable and damaging implications for the 'risk society' thesis. First, it outlines how insurance 'imaginaries' render even catastrophic and 'incalculable' modernization risks insurable. It also highlights the fact that such insurance has been mobilized and shaped by specific forms of political rationality, something which falls beneath the gaze of grand theory. Finally, the paper indicates that risk and uncertainty - far from being mutually exclusive - are frequently assembled together into governing technologies, and that uncertainty may denote a variable set of technologies through which catastrophes can be and are managed.