Weltrisikogesellschaft

Beck2007

Frankfurt/Main

The book started out as a translation into German of "World Risk Society" (1999) which Beck wrote directly in English. However, as Beck notes, in the following years so many new things happened that this book discusses (notably the war on terror and the growing international concern over global warming), that this edition has essentially grown into a new book in its own right.

Beck expands his concept of the "risk society" into "world risk society", as he notes that most of the overarching risks faced by what he calls "second modernity" are international in character - global warming, international terror, nuclear proliferation, etc. Beck argues that a theory of risk must take into account the realities of global society and politics.

The book seems to have received some spectacularly bad reviews in the German press - one reviewer complained that after the first 100 pages he still had no idea what Becks' essential thesis was. Others found that the book is merely a redigestion of his earlier theses, and that his arguments lack empirical basis.

Instead of presenting here a summary of Beck's main points and theses, which I (along with the reviewers) found quite hard to pinpoint, I highlight a couple of observations from the book that I found interesting or noteworthy.

- On the relationship between science and the risk society: although science is essentially about finding things out and therefore about lowering the risks we face, the rise of better knowledge about the world has served to increase perceptions of risks. As (in Beck's terminology) risk and risk perception are the same things, better knowledge of what is happening therefore actually increases risk. This is contrasted with previous states, where we were blissfully unaware of the dangers we face. This seeming paradox, that the more we try to control risk through science, the more risk we create, is one of the cornerstones of Beck's analysis (as far as I can make out).

- The "second modernity" (Beck's phrase) is characterised by the pervading anxiety about global risks to our way of life and humanity in general (global warming, terror, world recession, etc). This has as a consequence that individual fears about the future have also changed: Whereas in modern and premodern society the fear of a complete technologised and inhuman future dominated, we now see the start of the fear of almost the opposite: that the technological and comfortable way of life we now enjoy will not be able to go on much longer.