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Why class is too soft a category to capture the

explosiveness of social inequality at the beginning


of the twenty-rst century
Ulrich Beck
Abstract
We can distinguish four positions on the continuing, or maybe even increasing,
relevance of the category of class at the beginning of the twenty-rst century
depending on the extent to which they accord central importance to (1) the
reproduction or (2) the transformation of social classes with regard to (3) the
distribution of goods without bads or (4) the distribution of goods and bads. One
could say that Dean Curran introduces the concept of risk-class to radicalize the
class distribution of risk and charts who will able to occupy areas less exposed to
risk and who will have little choice but to occupy areas that are exposed to the
brunt of the fact of the risk society. As he mentioned it is important to note that this
social structuring of the distribution of bads will be affected not only by class, but
also by other forms of social structuration of disadvantage, such as gender and
race. In order to demonstrate that the distribution of bads is currently exacerbating
class differences in life chances, however, Curran concentrates exclusively on
phenomena of individual risks. In the process, he overlooks the problem of sys-
temic risks in relation of the state, science, new corporate roles, management the
mass media, law, mobile capital and social movements; at the same time, his
conceptual frame of reference does not really thematize the interdependence
between individual and systemic risks. Those who reduce the problematic of risk to
that of the life chances of individuals are unable to grasp the conicting social and
political logics of risk and class conicts. Or, to put it pointedly: class is too soft a
category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality in world risk society.
Keywords: Logic of class conict; logic of risk conict; social inequality;
world risk society
In his article, Risk Society and the Distribution of Bads (Curran 2013), Dean
Curran argues, that Becks theory of the risk society contains the basis of a
critical theory of class relations in the risk society. He tries to show how not
only is the risk society thesis not antithetical to class analysis, but that in fact
Beck (Institute for Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich) (Corresponding author email: u.beck@lmu.de)
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12005
The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 1
it can be used to reveal how class antagonisms and associated wealth differ-
entials will gain even greater importance as risks continue to grow (2013: 46).
This is undoubtedly an important step which is apt to make the sociology of
class, whose self-understanding is rooted in the experiences of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, receptive to the new realities at the beginning of the
twenty-rst century. For, today one often observes a general avoidance reex
among social scientists in the face of a global situation whose upheavals
overtax the familiar instruments of theory, rmly established expectations of
social change and the classical means of politics. Moreover, this avoidance
reex ensures that the social sciences are irrelevant for contemporary public
debates (Burawoy 2005).
This is especially true of many sociologists who in their theories and
research mainly pursue the question of the reproduction of social and political
order while ignoring that of the transformation of this order. We face the
epistemological challenges of a changing order of change, but most sociology
asks how, in view of the present and the future and through all upheavals, the
class system is reproduced (Pierre Bourdieu 1984, John H. Goldthorpe 2002,
John Scott 2002, Will Atkinson 2007), the system of power is reproduced
(Michel Foucault 1980), the (autopoietic) system is reproduced (Niklas
Luhmann 1995), etc.
1
To be sure, these authors focus on the normal functioning
of society and politics and are acute observers of the resistance of established
institutions to change. Nevertheless, it must be asked how far this very resist-
ance of their categorial outlook to transformation blinds them to the explosive
dynamics that are currently transforming the world.
What I mean by this becomes abundantly clear when one thinks of the major
risk events of recent decades Chernobyl, 9/11, climate change, the nancial
crisis, Fukushima, the euro crisis. Three features are common to them all. (1)
Because they give rise to a dramatic radicalization of social inequality both
inter-nationally and intra-nationally, they cannot continue to be conceptual-
ized in terms of the established empirical-analytical conceptual instrumen-
tarium of class analysis as class conicts in the class society. By contrast, they
indeed vary the narrative of discontinuity as contained in the theory of the
world risk society. (2) Before they actually occurred, they were inconceivable.
(3) They are global in character and in their consequences and render the
progressive networking of spaces of action and environments tangible. These
cosmopolitan events were not only not envisaged in the paradigm of the
reproduction of the social and political (class) system, but they fall outside of
this frame of reference in principle and as a result place it in question.
In contrast, the theory of the world risk society consciously starts from the
premise of the self-endangerment of modernity and attaches central impor-
tance to the question of how, in view of the impending catastrophe, the nation-
state social and political system is beginning to crumble and how the
understanding of the basic concepts of modern sociology and society hence,
64 Ulrich Beck
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
the understanding not only of class, but also of power, the state, the nation,
religion, family, the household, occupation and love are undergoing open-
ended transformations. For more than twenty-ve years now (Risk Society:
Towards a New Modernity was published in German in 1986) I have been
arguing that, not the social reproduction of class, but the social evolution of
global risk is the key concept for understanding the transformations of
modernity. Or, to put it pointedly: class is too soft a category to capture the
explosiveness of social inequality in world risk society.
This theory of world risk society and its implications for class analysis have
been criticized and challenged many times and in many ways. Dean Curran is
to be congratulated on his attempt to overcome some of the blockades and
misunderstandings which characterize the debate on the relationship between
class and risk. In order to characterize the specics of his achievement, it
makes sense to summarize the current state of the debate and to situate his
contribution within it (see Figure I).
We can distinguish four positions on the continuing, or maybe even increas-
ing, relevance of the category of class at the beginning of the twenty-rst
century depending on the extent to which they accord central importance to
(1) the reproduction or (2) the transformation of social classes with regard to
(3) the distribution of goods without bads or (4) the distribution of goods and
bads. The rst group of reproduction theories can be dened by the fact that
they ignore the unequal distribution of bads/risks and dene the differentia-
tion between classes solely in terms of the distribution of goods, i.e. of wealth.
Here the narrative of continuity, the resistance of classes to transformation
throughout all upheavals, is emphasized. My critique of the antiquatedness of
the category and theory of class is rejected by appeal to the empirical fact of
the enduring strong connection between class positions and income and edu-
cational differences (Atkinson 2007; Bourdieu 1984; Goldthorpe 2002; Scott
Figure I: Theorizing class in world risk society
Class
Reproduction Transformation
Distribution of
Goods without
bads
Bourdieu (1984),
Goldthorpe (2002), Scott
(2002), Atkinson (2007):
The continuity of class in
national societies
Therborn (2011): The
return of class in the
age of global inequality
Goods and bads Gabe Mythen (2005): Risk
reinforces the logic of class
distribution
Dean Curran (2013):
Risk
radicalizes/transforms
the logic of class
distribution
Whyclass is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality 65
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
2002). Thereby the class theorists and researchers normally miss the cosmo-
politization of the poor (but also the middle classes and, of course, the elites),
their multi-ethnic, multi-religious, transnational life forms and identities
(Hobbs 2013).
This debate suffers from the fact that class theorists, trapped in the class
logic, can conceive of the antithesis to the persistence of classes only in terms
of the disappearance of classes specically, in terms of a decrease in inequal-
ity and an increase in equality. However, that is precisely not my perspective.
The antithesis to the sociology of class that I propose and develop attaches
central importance, on the contrary, to the radicalization of social inequality.
This forces us to overcome the epistemological monopoly of the category of
class over social inequality and to uncouple historical classes from social
inequality, something which is evidently inconceivable for analysts of class.
2
The second position, which appears here under the heading of the Trans-
formation of Class, is represented by Gran Therborns The Return of Classes
in the Age of Global Inequality:
We are experiencing a historical turn, not only in geo-politics but also in
terms of inequality. The 19
th
and 20
th
century international development of
underdevelopment meant, among other things, that inequality among
humans became increasingly shaped by where they lived, in developed or
underdeveloped areas, territories, nations. By 2000, it has been estimated
that 80 percent of the income in equality among households depended on
the country you live in (Milanovic 2011: 112). This is currently changing.
Inter-national inequality is declining overall, although the gap between the
rich and poor has not stopped growing. But intra-national inequality is, on
the whole, increasing, albeit unevenly, denying any pseudo-universal deter-
minism of globalization or of technological change. This amounts to
a return of class as an increasingly powerful global determinant of ine-
quality . . . Now, nations are growing closer, and classes are growing apart.
(Therborn 2011: 3)
What makes Therborns argument so challenging and interesting is that he
combines the re-transformation of global inequality with the return of national
classes. The dramatic increase in income disparity between the richest 1%
and the rest is in fact a dramatic development that places the legitimacy of
capitalism in question, as the globalized Occupy movement importantly
demonstrates. In the USA in particular as Joseph Stiglitz (Vanity Fair, May
2012) has highlighted the richest 1 per cent owns 40 per cent of the national
wealth; moreover, almost a quarter of the annual national income ows into
their pockets and this richest 1 per cent controls almost all of the seats in the
US Congress. Yet it is questionable whether this dynamic can be appropriately
conceived in sociological terms as a return of class and whether it is not
66 Ulrich Beck
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
instead an exemplary case of the radicalization of social inequality through
individualization where individualization must be understood as a precon-
dition of radicalization (see note 2).
Therborns own characterization contains some pointers for this interpreta-
tion that these developments involve a post-class society aggravation of social
inequality.
It would derive its primary dynamic from the heterogeneous popular classes
of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and their, perhaps, less forceful counterparts
in the rich world. Empowered by a rise of literacy and by new means of
communication, the popular class movements face great hurdles of division
ethnicity, religion, and particularly the divide between formal and informal
employment as well as the dispersion of activities, for example in street
hawking and small sweatshops . . . (Therborn 2011: 5)
Some people might even read Therborns return of national class as an
empirical justication of methodological nationalism (Beck 2006; 2007; Beck
and Grande 2010), hence of the unreective choice of the nation-state class
society as the unit of research. But that would certainly be a mistake. For
Therborns approach actually conrms the critique of methodological nation-
alism namely, that the nation-state orthodoxy of class analysis must rst be
broken through by a global analysis of inequality in order to (possibly) conrm
his thesis of the return of class.
My decisive objection is a different one, however (and here I take up
Currans critique of class analysis). Like Goldthorpe and others, Therborn only
captures a partial aspect of the new problematic of inequality. This is because
everything that is confounding not only the nation-state class system but also
the global system, both at the categorial and the empirical level, is left out of
account by his theoretical framework and image of the world xated on this
class difference. The social explosiveness of global nancial risks, as I wrote
in 1999, is becoming real: it sets off a dynamic of cultural and political change
that undermines bureaucracies, challenges the dominance of classical econom-
ics and neoliberalism and redraws the boundaries and battleelds of contem-
porary politics (Beck 1999: 8).
It was the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy four years ago that actually plunged
the global nancial system into a crisis that threatened its very survival. Com-
bined with the global climate risk, the global nancial risk now also exacer-
bated into the threat to the existence of the euro and of Europe has
generated a difcult historical moment that conforms to Antonio Gramscis
denition of crisis. According to Gramsci, crisis is a historical moment in which
the old world order is collapsing and a new world must rst be fought for in the
face of resistances and contradictions; and this interregnum is marked by
many trials and tribulations. (Gramsci 1971).This is what we are currently
experiencing: the rupture the interregnum the simultaneity of collapse and
Whyclass is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality 67
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
a new open-ended departure which the paradigm of class theory and class
analysis fails to grasp. For this is a matter of state-mediated redistributions of
risk across nation-state borders which cannot be forced into the pigeonhole of
class conict. The risks posed by big banks are being socialized by the state
and imposed on retirees through austerity dictates. Risk redistribution con-
icts are breaking out between debtor countries and lender countries across
the world but also in Europe which certainly cannot be read in terms of a
class conict between countries. They are instead giving rise to politically
highly explosive risk inequality conicts between and within European
member states, as can be observed in real time over the past two years in the
case of the almost endless Euro crisis.
Both the epistemological monopoly of class analysis on the diagnosis of
social inequality and the methodological nationalism of the sociology of
inequality have contributed essentially to the fact that established sociology is
empty-handed and practically blind and disoriented in the face of the radical-
ized, transnational and post-class society power shifts and equality conicts
which are giving rise to the nancial, Europe and EU crises and are rightly
agitating the global public (Beck 2013).
The third position rests on a highly perceptive thematization of the distri-
bution of goods and bads, though, in the process, the distribution of risk is
subsumed under the category of class (Mythen 2005). Dean Curran, nally,
goes a step further in his fourth position. One could say that Curran introduces
the concept of risk-class to radicalize the class distribution of risk and charts
who will able to occupy areas less exposed to risk and who will have little
choice but to occupy areas that are exposed to the brunt of the fact of the risk
society. As he mentioned it is important to note that this social structuring of
the distribution of bads will be affected not only by class, but also by other
forms of social structuration of disadvantage, such as gender and race.
In this way, it becomes apparent and this is also Mythens argument that
there is in fact an overlap between the distribution of goods and bads.
Consequently, Beck is right to declare hunger hierarchical, but his claim that
the risks of reexive modernization are egalitarian completely ignores
the reexive nature of human beings, who when they perceive the scope
and intensity of these risks will modify their actions to avoid them. (Curran
2013:19)
This is a stinging critique. However, in my book, World Risk Society (1999: 5),
I also corrected my original thesis as follows: the rst law of environmental
risks is: pollution follows the poor. However, whether this coexistence and
continuity in the unequal distribution of goods and bads can be adequately
conceptualized and explained in terms of the category of class seems to me to
be more questionable than ever. For those who, like Dean Curran, subsume
risk inequality under the category of class ignore and defuse the explosiveness
68 Ulrich Beck
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
inherent in the conict logic of global risks. In this sense, Currans analysis
misses the key distinctions between (1) risk and catastrophe, risk and harm, (2)
individual and systemic risk and (3) the conict logic of social classes and that
of global risks (and their interpenetration).
3
(1) It begins with a misunderstanding, which the author shares with many
others. Beck tends to equate the risk society with a disaster society in which
maximal catastrophes serve as a paradigm for understanding risk in the risk
society (Curran 2013: 48). That is plainly wrong. Here Curran fails to recognize
my key distinction between risk and catastrophe. We are currently experienc-
ing an ination in talk of catastrophes, breakdowns or the looming end. Yet
here we must distinguish carefully between catastrophe and the rhetoric of
catastrophe. For example, the euro, at least at the present time of writing
(August 2012), has not yet collapsed. The point, therefore, is that a possible
catastrophe, which could occur in the future, is to be prevented by its antici-
pation in the present. This is exactly what is meant by the concept of risk in the
theory of the world risk society. It stresses the need to distinguish between the
catastrophe that has actually occurred and the impending catastrophe that is,
the risk. Therefore, risk society is precise not a catastrophe society, a Titanic
society. On the contrary, the concept of risk not only contains descriptions of
how (to develop the image) the cliff can be circumnavigated and hence the
sinking of the Titanic prevented. It is based instead on an image of the world
that replaces the fateful catastrophe, the too late, by the exhortation to act.
The world risk society is the opposite of a postmodern constellation. It
is a self-critical highly political society in a new sense: the transnational dia-
logue and cooperation between politics and democracy and perhaps even
sociology becomes a matter of survival.
Generally, the talk is of crisis, here by contrast we speak in terms of risk.
What is the relation between these two conceptual schemes? The concept of
risk contains the concept of crisis, but goes beyond it essentially on three
points. First, the concept of crisis effaces the distinction between (staged) risk as
the present future and catastrophe as the future future (about which we cannot
ultimately know anything). Speaking in terms of crisis ontologizes, as it were,
the difference between anticipated and actual catastrophe to which the theory
of the world risk society attaches central importance. Second, today the use of
the concept of crisis misleadingly suggests that it is possible to return to the
status quo ante in the process of surmounting crises. In contrast, the concept of
risk reveals thedifference of the century between what is threatening globally
and what answers are possible within the framework of nation-state politics.
This, however, also implies, third, that risk as it is understood is not a state of
exception like crisis but is instead becoming the normal situation, and hence
the motor driving a major transformation of society and politics.
Bryan S. Turner (like many others) criticizes my theory of world risk society
on the basis of what could be called a kind of nave risk realism, because
Whyclass is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality 69
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
it ignores the conceptual difference between risk and catastrophe. As Turner
notes:
A serious criticism of Becks arguments would be to suggest that risk has not
changed so profoundly and signicantly over the last three centuries. For
example, were the epidemics of syphilis and bubonic plague in earlier
periods any different from the modern environment illnesses to which Beck
draws our attention? That is, do Becks criteria of risk, such as their imper-
sonal and unobservable nature, really stand up to historical scrutiny? The
devastating plagues of earlier centuries were certainly global, democratic
and general. Peasants and aristocrats died equally horrible deaths. In addi-
tion, with the spread of capitalist colonialism, it is clearly the case that in
previous centuries many aboriginal peoples such as those of North America
and Australia were engulfed by environmental, medical and political catas-
trophes which wiped out entire populations. If we take a broader view of the
notion of risk as entailing at least a strong cultural element whereby risk is
seen to be a necessary part of the human condition, then we could argue that
the profound uncertainties about life, which occasionally overwhelmed
earlier civilizations, were not unlike the anxieties of our own n-de-sicle
civilizations. (Bryan S. Turner as quoted in Elliott (2002): 300)
Dean Curran, by contrast, is very well able to distinguish at the level of
empirical analysis between catastrophic events and risk situations; for he
operationalizes these events and situations in terms of empirical indicators of
spatial vulnerability (Blok 2012) for example, in the sense that the poorest
live in the geographical zones in which the risks of inundation, of destruction
through hurricanes and of landslides are greatest, whereas the wealthiest,
relatively speaking, monopolize the least vulnerable residential areas (Curran
2013: 4462).
(2) In order to demonstrate that the distribution of bads is currently exac-
erbating class differences in life chances, however, Curran concentrates exclu-
sively on phenomena of individual risks. In the process, he overlooks the
problem of systemic risks in relation of the state, science, new corporate roles,
management the mass media, law, mobile capital and social movements
(Arnoldi 2009; Matten 2004; Wilkinson 2010); at the same time, his conceptual
frame of reference does not really thematize the interdependence between
individual and systemic risks. However, anyone who subordinates risk logic to
class logic fundamentally fails to do justice to the former as a matter of their
very approach.
In the context of theWestern welfare state in relation to class, we still operate
with the idea of (institutional) compensation in relation to global risk nobody
does. Thus the continuity involved in using the class category renders this
fundamental lack of any political and institutional answer invisible (or reduces
it to the inappropriate existing nation-state representations and institutions).
70 Ulrich Beck
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
World risk society is distinct from nation-state modernity in this crucial
respect: the social compact or risk contract is increasingly broken down.
Risks are now incalculable and beyond the prospect for control, measurement,
socialization and compensation; . . . it makes no sense to insure oneself against
a global recession (Beck 1999: 8).
As regards the state, for example, this implies the following: Confronted with
global risks, produced by side-effects of the success of capitalistic modernity, the
leading patterns of political organization that, since the Peace of Westphalia in
1648, have governed society in terms of its spatial-political and economic
conguration are now being eroded by activities (economic and political) that
occur between states and by processes that are not bound to the state. The
outcome is the transition from a Westphalian-based system of government to a
post-Westphalian system of governance, where the bounds of the state and its
capacity effectively to regulate and control all manner of processes, risks and
externalities are fatally compromised (Grande and Zangl 2011).
In contrast to the individual risks and life chances thematized by Curran, the
institutional focus on risk emphasizes the staging in world risk society. That
follows from the central theoretical preoccupation with new global risk
dened, essentially, as those man-made, incalculable, uninsurable threats and
catastrophes that are anticipated. They often remain invisible and their per-
ceived existence depends, therefore, on how they become dened and con-
tested in knowledge. That is, global risks are socially constructed and dened
in terms of corresponding power relations of denition. Their existence takes
the form of scientic and alternative scientic knowledge. Consequently, their
reality can be dramatized or minimized, transformed or simply denied
according to the norms that decide what is known and what is not. Hence, they
are the (more or less successful) result of staging. Crucially, therefore, global
crises are extremely dependent on global new media. Indeed, when staged in
the media, global risk can become cosmopolitan events with a potentially
explosive global reach. In this perspective, cosmopolitan events are highly
mediatized, highly selective, highly variable, highly symbolic, local and global,
national and international, material and communicative, reexive experiences
and blows of fate. They transcend and efface all social boundaries and overturn
the global order that holds way in peoples minds.
4
(3) Those who reduce the problematic of risk to that of the life chances of
individuals are unable to grasp the conicting social and political logics of
risk and class conicts. The conict logic of classes is a matter of the antago-
nisms between labour and capital within the national framework, of the
organization of class interests and their representation in parliament and
government, hence of questions of distributing wealth while minimizing risks
for specic groups within the national hierarchy of inequality. The conict
logic of global risk, by contrast, is concerned with cross-border cooperation
to stave off catastrophes. Class conicts by their very logic spark the usthem
Whyclass is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality 71
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
conict specically between labour and capital and between nations. Living
and surviving within the horizon of global risk, by contrast, follows precisely
the contrary logic: Here it becomes rational to overcome the usthem con-
ict and to recognize others as cooperation partners. Risk, therefore, directs
our attention to the explosion of a global plurality that the class outlook
tends to negate. World risk society opens up a moral space out of which a
civic culture of responsibility reaching across borders and antagonisms could
(by no means must) emerge. As the bipolar world fades away, we are moving
from a world of enemies to one of dangers and risks.
A further difference between these two conict logics is that the class enemy
can be clearly identied. Within the framework of the threat logic of risk, often
it is not possible to identify a concrete actor or an antagonistic intention. The
threat is not direct, intentional and certain, but indirect, unintended and
uncertain. It is the threat and conict paradigm of risk that sets individual life
chances and institutional relations of power in motion in the globalized
modernity. Risk, and not class or war, is the determining factor of power,
identity and the future.
The scope of the theory of world risk society is ultimately a function of the
following: The socially constructed memory of past catastrophes (world wars,
colonialism, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, 9/11, Fukushima) founds an ethics of
never-again. The human catastrophe of yesteryear was not prevented. The
human catastrophe of tomorrow can and must be prevented: This is the ethics
of the never-again which is inherent in the logic of global risk (Beck and
Sznaider 2011).
I wonder why a large proportion of leading sociologists is content to tinker
around with obsolete categories, which obscures how breathtakingly exciting
sociology could become again. The early sociologists were fascinated by the
newly discovered, but yet to be surveyed, continent calledsociety. Areection
of this fascination could reappear if the curiosity of discovering and testing with
highly developed professional methods the unexplored landscapes, enthusi-
asms, contradictions and dilemmas of world risk society and its resources and
perspectives for governance and action were to revive the sociological imagi-
nation a process which Dean Curran, among others, has already begun.
(Date accepted: November 2012)
Notes
1. Interestingly, this is not true of the clas-
sics of sociology which were interested in
the transformation of social and political
systems, as the works of Auguste Comte and
Karl Marx, though also of MaxWeber, Georg
Simmel, mile Durkheim, etc., impressively
testify.
2. This idea can be elucidated in terms
of a historical example: We are the 99 per
cent! This slogan with which the Occupy
72 Ulrich Beck
London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 British Journal of Sociology 64(1)
Wall Street Movement occupied public
spaces (not just) in American cities illus-
trates the very case I have in mind. The indi-
vidualization of social equality rst makes
possible the radicalization of social inequal-
ity which can be connected back to class
categories and actors relevant for social and
political conduct only with difculty and
perhaps also only from the sociological
observer perspective (on this see below . . .).
On the impassioned debate over the relation
between class and individualization, which is
no longer conned to European develop-
ments but also includes developments in
South Korea and China, see Alpermann
(2011); Atkinson (2007); Beck and Grande
(2010); Chang and Song (2010); Shim and
Han (2010); Suzuki et al. (2010); Yan (2009;
2010).
3. On a more general level, Eugene A.
Rosa, Ortwin Renn and Aaron M. McCright
(2013) provide an overview of the sophisti-
cation of theories centred on the problma-
tique of risk, which have come from the
European tradition in sociological theory.
The idea of the risk society, rst advanced
by Ulrich Beck, who coined the term,
also has been taken up by other leading
European theorists particularly Anthony
Giddens and Niklas Luhmann. While differ-
ent in their details, Beck and Giddens share
a vision about risk that stems from the
process of globalization, from the boundless
reach of risk, and from the effect risk has on
individual identity and civic involvement.
Luhmann, on the other hand, provides a
stark contrast in orientation. He extends his
social systems approach to the topic of risk,
seeking to understand how systems are
socially constructed, how they demarcate
between risk and danger, and how they
manage risk. For Luhmann, there is no place
for agency, that is, for individual identity or
action in risk systems. This book provides for
the rst time in one place a critical, peda-
gogical exposition of these theorists. The
authors interestingly add Jrgen Habermas,
who has written little about risk society, to
their list of theorists who shaped risk society
theory.
4. In order to illustrate the necessity of a
cosmopolitan turn to risk theory it is
helpful to distinguish between self-
induced and externally-induced dangers.
This allows us to locate the problems of
inequality and dominance within the
concept of globalized risks itself. In this
way, it is possible to grasp more precisely
than before that there is a radical inequal-
ity in the situations of decision-makers and
of those affected by risks and/or dangers.
With the cosmopolitan turn it becomes
evident that the distinction between self-
induced risk and external risk is a cosmo-
politan ash-point, in so far as the relation
of whole regions of the world to one
another can be analysed in terms of the
externalization of self-produced dangers,
i.e. by shifting them onto others. The pow-
erful produce and prot from the risks,
whereas the powerless are affected to the
core of their being by the side effects of
decisions taken by others. (Beck and
Grande 2010: 423).
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