The object of this article is to examine the most characteristic features of the law governing the Polish insurance system in comparison with Western insurance systems. Western insurance literature of the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by the view that there is a fundamental conflict between insurance and communism. According to A. H. Mowbray, “in a sense, communism is insurance” and the development of insurance in capitalist countries, while strengthening the economic independence of individuals, creates a defence against revolutionary communism1.

The development of insurance in the Soviet Union and in other European socialist countries denies the view that the institution of insurance should be inseparably bound to the capitalist economic system and could not develop beyond it. Yet discussion of the method of compensating fortuitous losses in a communist society seems, at the present, to be at least premature theorizing. The idea of communism has not been realized yet. There are different ways of building socialism in so-called socialist countries. But it is a fact in all of those countries that neither the nationalization of the main means of production nor the elimination of the capitalist insurance companies from the insurance market has caused the end of insurance.

The question is whether we mean the same thing when talking about insurance in the capitalist system and about socialist insurance. Looking at this question only from the legal point of view the answer should be, in my opinion, yes. In Western legal literature, insurance is usually defined as a contract whereby one person, called the insurer, undertakes, in return for the agreed consideration, called the premium, to pay to another person, called the assured, a sum of money, or its equivalent, on the happening of a specified event2. Similar definitions can be found in the statutes. For example, Art. 2468 of the Civil Codes of Lower Canada and Quebec provides that: