Ulrich Beck’s fortunes took off with the publication of his ‘Risk Society’. Widely translated, its key message was that contemporary society is not only characterised by enhanced risk, but that risk has become ubiquitous. There is no longer any escape route: risk’s ‘boomerang effect’ now ensures that a catastrophe in one part of the world – from the use of pesticides and preservatives in food production to global warming, melting ice and rising sea levels – impacts on all others. Risk can no longer be contained, generally, or confined to ‘developing societies’, specifically.
Moreover risk has now become a central organizing category in both personal and public domains. Coping with risk has assumed high significance, and can, it seems, itself spawn further risks. I draw here on Elliott’s excellent ‘Contemporary Social Theory’, in which he writes:
‘consideration and calculation of risk-taking, risk-management or risk-detection can never be fully complete or secure, since there are always unforeseen and unintended aspects of risk environments.’
We have in fact now come to inhabit a ‘world risk society’, living without ever being able to fully grasp the ramifications of the new electronic global economy.
Beck uncovers risk across all aspects of our contemporary lives. It is a prime feature of modernity, and especially of what he came to call ‘second modernity’ (roughly post-1970s). Hazards have of course always been a part of life, and impacted heavily in traditional societies in the form of plagues and natural disasters. But risks are distinguished from (traditional, pre-industrial) hazards by Beck. It is not that contemporary life is more hazardous, rather that while hazards were extra-human, visited upon peoples by gods or nature, risks are now part and parcel of what it is to be human. Societal intervention, in the guise of decision-making, has transmuted incalculable hazards into calculable risks.
As Giddens, notes, humans are no longer at the mercy of ‘external nature’, but have become part of it, hence current arguments about global warming and the like being a function of constant and accelerating capitalist innovation. Habermas, interestingly, makes a similar point about ‘human nature’, suggesting that with advances (if that is the word) in genetics, it is no longer ‘a given’, but is becoming negotiable as the scientific capacity to intervene to facilitate parental choice expands. Moreover, critically, taking out insurance no longer works. Elliott summarizes:
· Risks now threaten irreparable global damage which can no longer be contained, and this renders redundant any notion of monetary compensation;
· In the event of catastrophic nuclear or chemical accidents, ‘any security monitoring of damages fails’;
· Accidents, reconstituted as ‘events’ without beginning or end, break apart delimitations in space and time;
· Notions of accountability collapse.
Beck is also associated with the concept of reflexive modernisation. Like Giddens, with whom he collaborated, he argued that reflexivity is a key feature of modern life. But while Giddens highlights the novel ways we individually reflexively attend to, monitor and re-adjust our ‘selves’ and our ‘lifecourses’ (paradigmatically on our iPhones), Beck put greater accent on macro-social factors. Like Giddens, he recognises modernity’s tendency towards increasing individualism, but he also saw modern society as torn between industrial society and ‘advanced modernity’, that is, between ‘simple modernisation’ and ‘reflexive modernisation’. Reflexive modernisation is characterised by a ‘blindness to risk and danger’. These have crept up on us and have precipitated ‘societal self-confrontation. Beck writes: ‘within the horizon of the opposition between old routine and new awareness of consequences and dangers society becomes self-critical.’ Society is now a more ‘conflictive, split, ambiguous and plural phenomenon’ (Elliot). In effect, we are in denial over the suicidal properties of risk society. Fixations on (hopeless) risk assessments merely betray our denial, confusion and impotence.
In his later work – notably, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vision’ and ‘Power in the Global Age’ – Beck postulated a new form of a European-cum-global cosmopolitanism. Here Beck, much like Habermas, is on something of a mission. Elliott again:
‘broadly speaking, his aim is to extend the politics of cosmopolitanism into a polemical engagement with neoliberalism throughout the consumerist, post-imperialist west.’
Nation states, like cultures, have become blurred entities in second modernity. Neoliberalism owes much to earlier notions of (white, masculine, western, imperialist) ‘universal’ autonomy and progress, translated in terms of material assets, the rule of law and civil society. This puts its disciples at odds with the new pluralism and ambiguity. The USA and the UK drew on neoliberalism’s outmoded ‘logic’ – only societies that practice democracy and value human rights (‘like ours’) can be legitimate – when they attacked Iraq in 2003. Beck goes on in fact to equate neoliberalism with a US global dictatorship.
Beck distinguished between two kinds of politics. The first owes much to a ‘national outlook’ or ‘methodological nationalism’, and holds that politics are (or should be) about sovereignty, the policing of borders and the maintenance of ‘exclusive identities’. The second focuses predictably enough on ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. Cosmopolitanism here involves ‘a positive pluralisation of national borders, a deterritorialised society, a mushrooming of globalism from within the nation state’ (Elliott).
Personally, I have a number of questions arising from my – admittedly selective and partial – exegesis of Beck’s theories. With reference to the ‘risk society’ thesis, I am not alone in arguing that for all (first and) second modernity’s novel characteristics: (a) the distinction between hazards and risks and the idea of the boomerang effect exaggerate discontinuity with the past (Bangladesh does and surely will suffer disproportionately from putative ‘global’ threats); and, relatedly, (b) it is an unhelpful simplification – though I must admit a good career move (though I impute no pre-planning in Beck’s case) – to try to capture or ‘essentialise’ an era in a concept.
As for the argument for a Habermas-like, European and Enlightenment-oriented cosmopolitanism, I have a comment. On the face of it, and maybe even after reflection, it seems to draw on precisely the kind of universalism that Beck scorns in relation to neoliberalism. Surely if neoliberalism’s foundation in univeralism is flawed, so too is Beck’s cosmopolitanism.
I have a further suggestion or two of my own, and it’s my blog after all! I think Beck, like many other sociologists, erroneously conflated structural and cultural change. He went on to argue, for example, that class relations are dead (or at least terminally ill), associating them with the past era of first modernity/industrial capitalism. I think he’s wrong. I think class, qua structure, is more salient in what he calls second modernity than previously. If you like, it is ‘objectively’ more significant. It is culture – and Beck like others rightly notes this – that has radically shifted, with the consequence that class is less salient ‘subjectively’ than it was formerly (thus class consciousness is severely diminished).
As for cosmopolitanism, I think there is a way of avoiding self-contradiction for Beck (which has been indicated by Habermas). While he cannot have it both ways, accusing neoliberalism of the errors he makes himself, it is possible, and vital, that the kind of cosmopolitan or universal reasoning he hankers after, as it were in the face today’s penchant for cultural pluralism/relativism, survives. And it can, as well as must do so in my view, if the (admittedly white, male, western, European, 18th century) Enlightenment is ‘reconstructed’ for the present. But I have blogged about this elsewhere. Today’s cultural pluralism typically lends itself to relativism (as well as to neo-conservatism, since any rational challenges to the status quo are ‘neutralised’), and relativism remains, in my old-fashioned view, self-refuting. Relativism can only be defended by non-relativist means. But, remember, culture is not structure.