Risk Society

The RISK SOCIETY is a concept describing the emergence of a social order organized increasingly around the politics of risk; it originated in the work of German sociologist and public intellectual Ulrich Beck during the late 1980s. This transformation is reflected in a widening of the public sphere, and of conventional realms of policy and politics, to include a range of environmental, scientific, and technological issues once considered beyond the scope of democratic politics.

The risk society has its basis in a general critique of Enlightenment ideals of science, technology, and expertise, and their application as normative models in social and environmental governance. It is argued that “scientism,” seen in Beck's 1992 book Risk Society as a quasi-religious cultural form which conflates the meaning of human and technological progress, has served to justify all manner of environmental health risks in the name of economic value, growth, and efficiency.

Technocratic forms of expertise, in this sense, have legitimated the re-creation of the world as an uncontrolled experiment, one wherein the ecological consequences of widespread social changes—from industrial transformations to new medical technologies to nuclear reactors—tend to be knowable only after they have been incorporated into the social landscape. Or, as Beck describes the role of expertise in the “industrial sub-politics” of technology policy, “decisions only reach the desks of politicians and the public sphere after being taken.” Reworking and extending philosopher Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere, Beck envisions in the risk society a world wherein such technocracies are being broken down and reconfigured across a range of social sites. Transformations in the ways that governments and civil societies deal with the risks that they produce are occurring through oppositional movements and through rifts and cleavages within the scientific and engineering communities.

The premise of the risk society, then, is that the production of new environmental and technological hazards in recent decades, though commonly rationalized as the unexpected or unavoidable byproducts of industrial society, has engendered, at [Page 1525]least in embryonic form, a political response—what Beck calls a second or reflexive modernity—which challenges many of the core propositions of the first (or industrial) modernity.

Disastrous global warming scenarios, ionizing radiation, and new uses of genetic technologies thus exemplify the kinds of unconfined experiments with the human environment which characterize the risk society, a world in which “the very idea of controllability, certainty, or security—which is so fundamental in the first modernity—collapses.” And yet despite its somewhat grim emphasis on risk and hazards, the model is remarkable for its optimism: With the inevitability of risk-sharing as a basis for community, there is the possibility (albeit one based on necessity) for opening new social sites for direct democratic politics in areas that have historically been closed to public participation, such as in law, environment and resource policy, medicine and health, and in the politics of science and technology. There are indeed many limited examples of such political achievements in risk politics and the sub-politics of risk definition, including historical and ongoing struggles over workplace health rights and regulations, new forms of public accountability in scientific and medical research, and in the successes of varied Green and environmental justice movements.

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