Beck, Ulrich

Risk Society

Ulrich Beck is widely recognized for developing the concept of the risk society. Indeed, Beck published Risk Society in 1986, and only a few months later, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster confirmed his claim that our society is being transformed by technologies that are beyond our immediate control. Risk societies are borderless societies characterized by the distribution of dangers, rather than the state's distribution of goods. Risks are uncontrolled and the consequences incalculable. Society is being transformed into a risk society or a world risk society. Beck continued to develop his thoughts on the transformation of modernity in the books Reflexive Modernization and Risky Freedoms. One of the central ideas he put forth in Risky Freedoms was the importance to modern individuals of “do-it-yourself” biographies, which are based on his notion of risk and free the individual from determination by society. The old classical elite ideal of relating to one's biography as a work of art has become a necessity in the age of globalization, as people increasingly lack the opportunity to construct orderly and linear self-histories. As such, in his theory of individualization, Beck tries to put the Subject back into social theory. This theory highlights new potentialities of social action, which can no longer be based on the traditional patterns of social participation and political manipulation.

Second Modernity

In addition to the concept of risk and individualization, Beck also examined the concepts of globalization, cosmopolitization, and “second modernity.” For Beck, the term globalization refers to a reflexive rather than a linear process, taking the global and the local (or the universal and the particular) not as opposites, but as combined and mutually implicit principles. For him, these concepts indicate a transition between historical epochs, or more precisely, to the transition from a “first modernity,” characterized by the congruence between nation and state (with an emphasis on the welfare state), to a “second modernity,” characterized by a world society and transnationalism. This does not mean, of course, that the first modernity is over and done with, and it does not mean that we live in a postmodern society in which everything is being deconstructed. Ulrich Beck does not see himself as a postmodern thinker. Indeed, in nearly all of his major works, Beck claims that he is intellectually committed to the project of the Enlightenment. This means that he sees in the European traditions of reason and liberty the chance for people to realize freedom. Unlike postmodern theorists, he does not hold these notions as spurious or as mechanisms of oppression. For Beck, social theory is an instrument of human emancipation. For him, sociology's problem is that it identifies its subject matter, “society,” with the nation-state. In this view, the territorial state is society's container—a final victory for Hegel, so to speak. In fact, it was not long ago that sociologists were demanding to “bring the state back in.” Ulrich Beck does not want to throw the state back out. But he wants to break the state's theoretical identification with society in order to demonstrate the sociological possibilities of reconstructing the nation-state into a cosmopolitan state to serve the needs of a cosmopolitan society.

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