Risk Society

The risk society concept was introduced in Ulrich Beck's now-canonical 1986 text Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. According to Beck, we are currently living in a transformative moment of the modern era. Whereas previous societies faced life-threatening natural hazards—floods, famines, and droughts—the risks faced by contemporary societies (e.g., nuclear explosion, environmental degradation, toxins, terrorism) are unique in that they are consequences of decisions made by human beings. Beck understands risk as a side effect of industrial progress, but he is clear that the current era is not any more hazardous than the premodern world. The key difference of the modern era, Beck maintains, is that manufactured risks (as opposed to natural disasters) are tied to human activity, rationalistic calculation, and human faith in science and technology.

The significance of the risk society concept as a major theoretical advancement in governance studies became clearer with the publication of World Risk Society, in 1999, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, in 2004, and a series of highly influential papers by [Page 842]Beck, Wolfgang Bonss, and Christoph Lau. Beck's argument rests on the distinction between the first and second ages of modernity. In the first, simple age of modernity (industrial modernity), Beck argues that a residual risk society began to emerge from the successes of industrial production. The side effects of the residual risk society (pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion) stimulated a reflection on industrial modern production to the extent that people were aware of the dangers of industrial production. Still, society maintained a faith in science and technology, and there remained faith in human supremacy and scientific advancement.

According to Beck, as societies enter the second modern period, the unintended side effects of industrial production become a dominant force in society and history. The passive reflection that is characteristic of the first modern period is replaced by an active reflexivity in the second age of modernity. Under conditions of reflexive modernization, modernity itself becomes a problem. But in Beck's view, the conditions of governance in the second modernity are far more complex than a reflexive engagement with risk. Under conditions of reflexive modernization, the manufactured uncertainties of the first modern period configure with trends toward individualization, globalization, and subpolitical relations. Through these processes, the rule-directing linear logic of the first modern period is replaced with a nonlinear, rule-altering logic immersed in contingency and ambivalence. The individual in the first modernity period responded to heightened awareness of risk in a regulative fashion, seeking systemic solutions to catastrophic conditions, but in the second modernity period, the reflexive and cosmopolitan individual confronts the institutional integrity of the first modern period in a constitutive manner.