Risk Society Ulrich Beck

“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 Offentlichkeit, 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 1 990 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.”

(Introduction, Scott Lash and Brian Wynne)

The theme of this book is the unremarkable prefix 'post'. It is the key word of our times. Everything is 'post'. We have become used to postindustrialism now for some time, and we can still more or less make sense of it. With post-modernism things begin to get blurred. The concept of post-Enlightenment is so dark even a cat would hesitate to venture in. It hints at a 'beyond' which it cannot name, and in the substantive elements that it names and negates it remains tied to the familiar. Past plus post - that is the basic recipe with which we confront a reality that is out of joint.

This book is an attempt to track down the word 'post', alternatively called 'late' or 'trans'. It is sustained by the effort to understand the meanings that the historical development of modernity has given to this word over the past two or three decades. This can only succeed through some no-holds-barred wrestling against the old theories and customary ways of thinking, whose life has been artificially prolonged by the word 'post'. Since these are lodged not only in others but within myself, the noise of the wrestling sometimes resounds in this book, deriving its volume in part from the fact that I have also had to grapple with my own objections. Thus some things may have turned out shrill, overly ironic or rash. One cannot resist the gravitational pull of old ways of thinking with the usual academic balancing act.