Are various catégories of risk and insurance likely to build a theory for the social state, a fortiori if it is widely accepted by integrating the “four pillars”, which are social protection, the right to work, public services and macrœconomic policies for supporting employment? This article maintains that although risk and insurance catégories are important in acknowledging the genesis of the social state, they must be transcended if we want to see the underlying factors and the analytical foundation thereof. The mobilisation of these catégories has been criticised in two ways: basing the social state on accidentology does not allow it to realise that its vocation surpasses risk protection; they tend to reify the social state by erasing what is, through state intervention, a truly political construction. This article thus noticeably deviates from the thesis presented by F. Ewald (1986) in L’État providence (The welfare state). Without being reduced to this aspect, it engages in a systematic discussion of this work, twenty years after its publication. This article stresses the fact that the social state cannot be reduced to risk and insurance. While carefully maintaining some dialectic, this article studies the way in which it nevertheless hinges on these catégories.