Ulrich Beck
Modern societies now produce dangers like pollution and nuclear accidents that know no borders, and must learn to deal with the side effects of their own success.
Placement
His “Risikogesellschaft” appeared in the year of Chernobyl: modern societies no longer distribute only wealth but also self-made risks – and must turn reflexively on their own foundations.
Key ideas
- Risk society
- Reflexive modernisation
- Individualisation
- Cosmopolitanism vs. methodological nationalism
Influence
Influenced by 3
Karl Marx
influenced by
Beck set the risk society against Marx’s class society: where industrial modernity distributed wealth, reflexive modernity also distributes risks, and individualisation yields a ‘capitalism without classes’ (Risikogesellschaft, 1986). U. Beck, Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (1986); “Jenseits von Stand und Klasse?” (1983)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Georg Simmel
influenced by
Commentators trace Beck’s individualisation thesis to Simmel’s individuality arising from intersecting social circles; Beck diagnosed a new surge of it in post-war West Germany (Risikogesellschaft, 1986). U. Beck, Risikogesellschaft (1986); G. Simmel, Über sociale Differenzierung (1890); Soziologie (1908), “Die Kreuzung sozialer Kreise”
Evidence: AI draft
Georg Simmel › 1858–1918
Max Weber
influenced by
Beck turned Weber’s terms status group and class on current inequality, arguing that individualisation leaves it ‘beyond status and class’ (‘Jenseits von Stand und Klasse?’, 1983). U. Beck, “Jenseits von Stand und Klasse?”, in R. Kreckel (ed.), Soziale Ungleichheiten (1983); Risikogesellschaft (1986)
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Works
- 1986Risk Society
Published in the year of Chernobyl: industrial modernity produces risks it can no longer contain, and conflicts over the distribution of goods are joined by conflicts over the distribution of hazards.
Position
Beck’s thesis was that industrial modernity is being transformed by its own success. Classical industrial society argued about how to distribute wealth; the “risk society” must also distribute the dangers it produces itself – radiation, toxins, climate change, financial crashes. Such risks are often invisible, depend on scientific knowledge to be perceived at all, and cross the boundaries of class and nation: “Poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic.” Because science and industry produce the very risks they are asked to control, modernity becomes “reflexive”: it is confronted with itself, and its institutions lose their unquestioned authority. At the same time Beck diagnosed a new wave of individualisation. Class, family and fixed gender roles lose their binding force, and people must assemble their own biographies – a freedom that brings new dependence on labour markets and welfare states, and whose consequences for intimate life he and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim explored in The Normal Chaos of Love (1990). In his later work Beck criticised the “methodological nationalism” of the social sciences, which treat nation-states as the natural containers of society, and argued for a cosmopolitan outlook suited to a world of global risks.
Life & context
Ulrich Beck was born in 1944 in Stolp in Pomerania (now Słupsk in Poland) and grew up in Hanover. He first studied law in Freiburg, then sociology, philosophy, psychology and political science in Munich, where he took his doctorate in 1972 and his habilitation in 1979. He was professor of sociology in Münster (1979–81) and Bamberg (1981–92) and from 1992 at the University of Munich, and he also taught at the London School of Economics. Risikogesellschaft, published in 1986 a few months after the Chernobyl disaster, made him known far beyond academia. A committed European and public intellectual, he intervened in debates on globalisation, ecology and the euro crisis. He died unexpectedly in Munich on 1 January 2015.
Further main works
- The Normal Chaos of Love (with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, 1990)
- Reflexive Modernization (with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, 1994)
- What Is Globalization? (1997)
- World at Risk (2007)
- The Metamorphosis of the World (posthumous, 2016)
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