Ulrich Beck

The Theory of Reflexive Modernization Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme

How can one distinguish the concept of second modernity from the concept of postmodernity? Postmodernists are interested in deconstruction without reconstruction, second modernity is about deconstruction and reconstruction. Social sciences need to construct new concepts to understand the world dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century. Modernity has not vanished, we are not post it. Radical social change has always been part of modernity. What is new is that modernity has begun to modernize its own foundations. This is what it means to say modernity has become reflexive. It has become directed at itself. This causes huge new problems both in reality and in theory. There has been a pluralization of the boundaries within and between societies, between society and nature, between Us and Other, between life and death. This pluralization also changes the inherent nature of boundaries. They become not so much boundaries as a variety of attempts to draw of boundaries. Border conflicts become transformed into conflicts over the drawing of boundaries. Where postmodernism simply celebrates this multiplication of boundaries, the theory of second modernity starts with the problem this new reality poses for individual and collective decisions, and with the problem that the continued existence of such decisions poses for theory. Institutions that are capable of such conscious boundary drawing are enabled in a way that those of the first modernity were not. But this process also generates qualitatively new kinds of trouble and crises. To investigate those troubles is to unveil the emergence of the second modernity.

The reinvention of politics : rethinking modernity in the global social order

Introduction. 1. The Age of Side Effects: On the Politicization of Modernity. 2. The Construction of the Other Side of Modernity: Counter--modernization. 3. Subpolitics -- The Individual Returns to Society. 4. Ways to Alternative Modernities. 5. The Reinvention of Politics. 6. The Art of Doubt. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory

Introduction - Barbara Adam and Joost van Loon Repositioning Risk: The Challenge for Social Theory PART ONE: RECASTING RISK CULTURE Risk or Angst Society? - Alan Scott Two Views of Risk, Consciousness and Community Risk Culture - Scott Lash Risk, Trust and Scepticism in the Age of New Genetics - Hilary Rose PART TWO: CHALLENGING BIG SCIENCE Nuclear Risks - Alan Irwin, Stuart Allan and Ian Welsh Three Problematics Genotechnology - Lindsay Prior, Peter Glasner and Ruth McNally Three Challenges to Risk Legitimation Health and Responsibility - Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim From Social Change to Technological Change and Vice Versa PART THREE: MEDIATING TECHNOLOGIES OF RISK Child Organ Stealing Stories - Claudia Castaneda Risk, Rumour and Reproductive Technologies Liturgies of Fear - Howard Caygill Biotechnology and Culture Virtual Risks in an Age of Cybernetic Reproduction - Joost van Loon PART FOUR: P(L)AYING FOR FUTURES Information, Instantaneity and Global Futures Trading - Deirdre Boden Discourses of Risk and Utopia - Ruth Levitas Risk Society Revisited - Ulrich Beck Theory, Politics and Research Programmes

Living in the World Risk Society

Abstract In a world risk society, we must distinguish between ecological and financial dangers, which can be conceptualized as side effects, and the threat from terrorist networks as intentional catastrophes; the principle of deliberately exploiting the vulnerability of modern civil society replaces the principle of chance and accident.

Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity?

The discourse on climate politics so far is an expert and elitist discourse in which peoples, societies, citizens, workers, voters and their interests, views and voices are very much neglected. So, in order to turn climate change politics from its head onto its feet you have to take sociology into account. There is an important background assumption which shares in the general ignorance concerning environmental issues and, paradoxically, this is in corporated in the specialism of environmental sociology itself — this is the category of ‘the environment’. If ‘the environment’ only includes everything which is not human, not social, then the concept is sociologically empty. If the concept includes human action and society, then it is scientifically mistaken and politically suicidal.

Nicht Autonomie, sondern Bastelbiographie. Anmerkungen zur Individualisierungsdiskussion am Beispiel des Aufsatzes von Günter Burkart

Zusammenfassung Die Individualisierungsdiskussion hat breite Kreise gezogen. Der Beitrag versucht eine Zwischenbilanz. Am Beispiel des vorstehenden Aufsatzes von Günter Burkart wird gezeigt, daß „Individualisierung“ Auflösung und Ablösung industriegesellschaftlicher Lebensformen durch solche meint, in denen die Individuen ihre Lebensformen und sozialen Bindungen unter sozialstaatlichen Vorgaben selbst herstellen, inszenieren, zusammenbasteln müssen. Insbesondere zwei Mißverständnisse blockieren die Diskussion: das individualistische und das rationalistische Mißverständnis. Beim ersten wird letztlich eine Auflösung der Gesellschaft unterstellt, beim zweiten davon ausgegangen, daß Individualisierung bewußte und autonome Entscheidungen impliziert. Damit werden die biographischen Unsicherheiten und Dilemmata verkannt, die mit fortschreitender Individualisierung alltäglich werden.

Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society

The concept of the national is often perceived, both in public and academic discourse as the central obstacle for the realization of cosmopolitan orientations. Consequently, debates about the nation tend to revolve around its persistence or its demise. We depart from this either-or perspective by investigating the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan nation’ as a facet of world risk society. Modern collectivities are increasingly preoccupied with debating, preventing and managing risks. However, unlike earlier manifestations of risk characterized by daring actions or predictability models, global risks can no longer be calculated or forecast. Accordingly, more influence accrues to the perception of risk, largely constructed by media representations. Cosmopolitanized risk collectivities are engendered through the anticipation of endangered futures which are, for the most part, communicated through an increasingly global media scape. While global media events produce shared exposure, risk conceptions retain distinctive political-cultural features as their respective meanings are prefigured by path-dependent pasts. Nevertheless, the promulgation of risk societies, we argue, results in a reimagination of nationhood which takes place in the context of: global norms (e.g. human rights); globalized markets; transnational migrations; global generations and their embeddedness in civil society movements; and the local interpenetration of world religions to name but a few of the global backdrops shaping new associational intersections. We develop our argument in four interrelated steps. Contrary to essentialized notions of nationalism or universal versions of cosmopolitanism, we address the cosmopolitan reconfiguration of nationhood by differentiating between presumptions of thick belonging and the actual proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations. In a second step we overcome the territorial fixation of the social sciences by shifting our attention to temporal dimensions, with a particular focus on competing conceptions of the future. In a third step we demonstrate how these cosmopolitan transformations of nationhood are taking place in the context of a world risk society regime that marshals a set of cosmopolitan imperatives situating the global other in our midst. In a fourth step we illustrate these developments by exploring how the mediatization of risk, and concomitant notions of the future, contribute to the reimagination of cosmopolitan risk collectivities.

Jenseits des methodologischen Nationalismus

Zusammenfassung: Die Kernfragen dieses einleitenden Aufsatzes lauten: Wie konnen Gesellschaftsund Politiktheorie theoretisch, methodologisch und empirisch fur eine historisch neue, „verflochtene“ Moderne geoffnet werden, die ihre eigenen Grundlagen aufhebt? Wie kann die Theorie die fundamentale Zerbrechlichkeit und Wandelbarkeit der gesellschaftlichen Dynamiken (unbeabsichtigte Nebenfolgen, Herrschaft und Macht) erschliesen, die am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts von der Globalisierung von Kapital und Risiken ausgehen? Was meint „methodologischer Nationalismus“, welche theoretischen und methodologischen Probleme entstehen hier, und wie kann die theoretische und empirische Forschung sich fur diese offnen? Im Folgenden entwickeln wir diese „kosmopolitische Wende” in der soziologischen und politischen Theorie und Forschung in vier Schritten: Zunachst prasentieren wir die wichtigsten begrifflichen Werkzeuge einer Theorie der kosmopolitischen Modernen; danach de-konstruieren und re-definieren wir das Modell westlicher Modernisierung anhand von Beispielen aus der Forschung uber Individualisierung und Risiko; drittens greifen wir das Schlusselproblem des methodologischen Kosmopolitismus auf, namlich die Definition der angemessenen Untersuchungseinheit; und schlieslich diskutieren wir, viertens, Perspektiven und Dilemmata einer Theorie kosmopolitischer Modernen, insbesondere Probleme des Adressatenbezugs und des politischen Handelns.

State of emergency

THE QUESTION concerning the condition and application of the contemporary State of Emergency is now at the centre of theoretical exploration across a range of specialities within the humanities and the critical social sciences, from sociology and political theory to literature, cultural, philosophical and international studies. The 14 articles written by highly distinguished contributors for this Special Section of Theory, Culture & Society on the State of Emergency are varied in their theoretical viewpoints, the cultural intentions behind their texts and in their social emphasis. The contributions are engaged with investigating questions such as the critical social significance of state and military institutions, with law and political order, the implications of terror and violence, and for whose political objectives the State of Emergency is planned. The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims. Nazi Germany’s Decrees of 1933 are, for instance, a first-rate illustration of the modern State of Emergency. The 28 February Decree, for example, was one of the most oppressive acts of the new Nazi administration. It authorized the suspension of civil liberties in the wake of the fictitious crisis produced by the Nazis as a consequence of the fire that wrecked the Reichstag parliament building on the preceding day. Now, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have not, of course, formally affirmed a contemporary State of Emergency in their governments. Yet, in this Introduction, I shall argue that the Bush and Blair regimes are certainly beginning to lay the foundations for the state and purposes of a ‘hypermodern’ State of Emergency (Armitage,

Emancipatory catastrophism: What does it mean to climate change and risk society?

The metamorphosis of the world is about the hidden emancipatory side effect of global risk. This article argues that the talk about bads produces ‘common goods’. As such, the argument goes beyond what has been at the heart of the world risk society theory so far: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They are producing normative horizons of common goods. This is what the author defines as ‘emancipatory catastrophism’. Emancipatory catastrophism can be seen and analysed by using three conceptual lenses: first, the anticipation of global catastrophe violates sacred (unwritten) norms of human existence and civilization; second, thereby it causes an anthropological shock, and, third, a social catharsis.