Risk Society [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONUlrich Beck's Risk Society is already one of the most influential European works of social analysis in the late twentieth century. Risikogesellschaft was published in German in 1986. In its first five years it sold some 60,000 copies. Only a very few books in post-war social science have realized that sort of figure, and most of those have been textbooks. Risk Society is most definitely not a textbook. In the German speaking world - in terms of impact both across disciplines and on the lay public - comparison is probably best made with Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, published in German some twenty-five years before Beck's book, though only released in English as The Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989.But Beck's book has had an enormous influence. First, it had little short of a meteoric impact on institutional social science. In 1990 the biannual conference of the German Sociological Association was entitled 'The Modernization of Modernization?' in oblique reference to Beck's thesis of reflexive modernization. Risk Society further played a leading role in the recasting of public debates in German ecological politics. Ulrich Beck is not just a social scientist but what the Germans call a Schriftsteller, a word that loses much of its meaning when translated into English as essayist or non-fiction writer. The personal and essayistic style of Risikogesellschaft - though it is a quite accessible book in the German - has made it an immensely difficult book to translate. And Mark Ritter, elsewhere a translator of Simmel, has done a heroic job here. Beck, as Schriftsteller and public sphere social scientist, writes regularly in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. There is no equivalent of this in the Anglo-American world, and one is reminded of a continental European tradition in which Walter Benjamin once wrote regularly for the same Frankfurt newspaper and Raymond Aron for Le Figaro.This said. Risk Society consists of two central interrelated theses. One concerns reflexive modernization and the other the issue of risk. Let us address these sequentially.i'li,' 1' ,' I . 't 1.Reflexive ModernizationThere is something apt in the above mentioned juxtaposition of Beck's work on risk society and Habermas's on the public sphere. In a very important way Habermas first gave bones in this early seminal work to what would later be his theory of modernization. Beck of course makes no claims to the sort of theoretical depth and weight that Habermas has