Renowned sociologist and social thinker Ulrich Beck has died.
Ulrich Beck (Munich University and LSE) has become one of the world’s most
famous intellectuals and most quoted social scientists in recent decades.
Ulrich Beck / Foto - -Beck’s
book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1986/1992) is a scholarly and
political bestseller which was translated into 35 languages, with about 24,000
44,000 academic citations. While firm in criticizing those who claim Western
societies are “postmodern”, Beck offers an immanent critique of modernity’s
failed promises. Due to its own successes, modern society now faces failure:
while in the past experiments were conducted in a lab, now the whole world is a
test bed. Whether nuclear plants, genetically modified organisms,
nanotechnology – if any of these experiments went wrong, the consequences would
have a global impact and would be irreversible.
Ulrich Beck claimed that contemporary society is at the cusp of a
transition between “industrial society” and “risk society”. Risk society,
explained Beck, is “an inescapable structural condition of advanced
industrialization” and “Modern society has become a risk society in the sense
that it is increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risks
that it itself has produced.” Beck contended that the changing nature of
society’s relation to production and distribution is related to the
environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific
and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social
conflict. Whereas in earlier class-based societies only the proletariat was
victimized, in the emerging worldwide risk society all groups – even the rich –
are threatened. Beck made the important point stressing that
risk and class positions overlap on
national and international scales.
In this striking book Beck also provided a
framework within which environmental politics can be understood, explained and
developed. Beck recommended ignoring the mathematical morality of experts,
which seek to identify the level of a given risk by calculating the probability
of its occurrence. Instead, man’s fear of collapse should offer an opportunity
for international cooperation and a cosmopolitan turn in social sciences.
Drawing upon ideas developed in Risk Society, in Ecological Politics in an Age
of Risk (1995), Beck establishes the foundations of an original and
far-reaching analysis of modern politics.
Instead of posing ‘good’ social movements against ‘bad’ institutions, he
proposes a transformation of the institutions themselves, of science, and of
business, so that organized irresponsibility can be changed into a sort of
democratic accountability.
Ulrich Beck’s other numerous and highly
influential works have focused on topics like globalization, cosmopolitanism,
labour and social inequalities.
“After all, the ecological issue, considered politically and
sociologically, focuses at heart on a systematic, legalized violation of
fundamental civil rights – the citizen’s right to life and freedom from bodily
harm… In the ecological crisis we are dealing with a breach of fundamental
rights that is cushioned and disguised during prosperity but that has socially
destabilizing long-term effects that can scarcely be overestimated.”
https://economicsociology.org/2015/01/04/ulrich-beck-has-died-his-powerful-concept-of-risk-society-is-relevant-as-never-was-before/
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