Ulrich Beck Is The World's Most Important Pandemic Intellectual

8/2/2020 Ulrich Beck Is the World's Most Important Pandemic Intellectual
THE BIG THINK
The Sociologist Who Could

Save Us From Coronavirus
Ulrich Beck was a prophet of uncertainty—and the most important
intellectual for the pandemic and its aftermath.
BY ADAM TOOZE
AUGUST 1, 2020, 8:33 AM
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We all know the Chernobyl script. A badly designed reactor

suffered a meltdown. The decrepit Soviet regime tried to hide the disaster.
Millions of citizens were put at risk. And the truth came out. The regime
paid the price. Its legitimacy was in tatters. Collapse followed.
For liberals it is a pleasing morality tale. Dictatorship fails when faced with
the challenges of modernity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
When COVID-19 struck, we wondered whether it might be Chinese

President Xi Jinping’s Chernobyl. But after initial prevarication driven by
Wuhan’s local politics, China’s national leadership reasserted its grip. The
worst moment was Feb. 7, when hundreds of millions of Chinese took to the
Internet to protest the treatment of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang,
who had died of the disease. Since then Beijing has taken control, both of
the disease and the media narrative. Far from being a perestroika moment,
the noose of party discipline and censorship has tightened.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-could-save-us-from-coronavirus/ 1/19
Adam Tooze is a history professor and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. His
latest book is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and he is currently working
on a history of the climate crisis.
By the spring it was White House staffers who were likely watching the
HBO miniseries Chernobyl and wondering about their own boss. Lately,
the historian Harold James has asked whether the United States is living
through its late-Soviet moment, with COVID-19 as President Donald
Trump’s terminal crisis. But if that turns out to be the case, it will not be
because of a botched cover-up; Americans are living neither in late-Soviet
Ukraine nor in the era of Watergate, when a sordid exposé could sink a
president. Of course, Trump was culpably irresponsible in making light of
the disease. But he did so in the full glare of TV cameras. The president
reveled in flouting the recommendations of eggheaded public health
experts, correctly calculating that a large swath of his base was not
concerned with conventional norms of truth or reason.
But the fact that neither Xi’s China nor Trump’s United States are a good
match for the late Soviet Union doesn’t mean that Chernobyl is not
relevant to our COVID-19 predicament. What should interest us is not so
much the downfall of the Soviet Union as the more mundane
preoccupations of the Western Europeans who in 1986 found themselves in
the path of the Chernobyl radiation cloud. As the news leaked out of the
disaster, they faced many of the same questions that have haunted us in
2020. Which tests were to be trusted? Was it safe to go outside? Should
children play in sand pits? What types of food were safe? How long would it
last? What were the trade-offs? What exactly was a becquerel? How many
were safe? Which of the vast array of reports, data, and recommendations
should one read? Which should one trust?
But the fact that neither Xi’s China nor Trump’s United
States are a good match for the late Soviet Union doesn’t
mean that Chernobyl is not relevant to our COVID-19
predicament.
There is no HBO series about life under the fallout cloud that summer. (In
terms of curies per square kilometer, the radiation was worst in two belts:
one stretching northwest across Scandinavia, the other to the south across
Slovenia, Austria, and Bavaria.) What we do have is a book, Risk Society,
published by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck with exquisite timing in
the spring of 1986.
Beck argued that the omnipresence of large-scale threats of global scope,

anonymous and invisible, were the common denominator of our new
epoch: “A fate of endangerment has arisen in modernity, a sort of counter-
modernity, which transcends all our concepts of space, time, and social
differentiation. What yesterday was still far away will be found today and in
the future ‘at the front door.’” The question, so vividly exposed by the
crises such as Chernobyl and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is how to
navigate this world. The relevance of Beck’s answers are even more
apparent in our day than they were in his own.
A television at Chernobyl’s catastrophe museum in Kiev plays a documentary in 2006 that shows footage of the roughly 600,000 soldiers,
firemen, and civilians who were deployed over four years to clean up after the nuclear meltdown. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
A medical staff member gestures inside an isolation ward at the Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on March 10.
STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Beck was in many ways an emblematic figure of postwar

Germany. Born in 1944 near the Baltic coast in the Pomeranian town of
Stolp, now Slupsk in Poland, Beck’s family fled the Red Army to settle in
the booming industrial city of Hanover. He studied sociology not in the
famously radical Frankfurt, or at the Free University of Berlin, but in
Freiburg and Munich. By the early 1980s he was comfortably ensconced as
a professor of sociology upriver from Frankfurt, in picturesque Bamberg.
Following the success of Risk Society, Ulrich Beck would emerge as
perhaps Germany’s most widely recognized social scientist after Jürgen
Habermas.
Not for nothing Beck has been dubbed a “zeitgeist sociologist.” The
intellectual world he was responding to in the early 1980s in West Germany
was one of considerable uncertainty. The reform momentum of the 1960s
and 1970s had ebbed. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government
had little of the energy of U.S. President Ronald Reagan or British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher. Habermas characterized the period in
intellectual and political terms as die neue Unübersichtlichkeit—the New
Obscurity. The most common move was to refer to the period as an age of
“post-”—post-industrial, postmodern, postcolonial. But as Beck put it, the
use of the term “post-” was a marker of our helplessness, the intellectual
equivalent of a blind man’s stick probing in the dark. Facing up to the
challenge of providing a positive definition, Beck chose “risk society.”
In the early 1980s, the theme of risk was in the air. The escalation of Cold
War tension created a pervasive sense of threat. The campaign against
DDT, given huge prominence by Rachel Carson’s bestselling Silent Spring,
had heightened awareness of invisible chemical pollution. The Three Mile
Island incident of 1979 brought home the danger of nuclear accidents. In
the United States in 1982, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky had outlined
their cultural theory of risk, elaborating on Douglas’s earlier
anthropological work. Charles Perrow warned that in living with massive
complex systems such as air traffic control systems, dams, and nuclear
reactors, accidents must be accepted as normal.
Beck’s contribution in Risk Society was to offer a compelling sociological

interpretation of this pervasive sense of undefined but omnipresent threat,
both as a matter of personal and collective experience and as a historical
epoch. But more than that, Risk Society is a manifesto of sorts, proposing a
novel attitude toward and politics for contemporary reality.
The West’s first wave of modernization had been carried forward by an

enthusiastic overcoming of tradition and a confident subordination of
nature by science and technology. The disorienting realization of the late
20th century was that those very same energies, those same tools were now
the source not only of our emancipation but also of our self-endangerment.
To retreat would be to put the gains of modernization at risk. We could not
deny the benefits of modern medicine. But nor could we deny its risks and
side effects, intended and unintended. What was required was, for want of
a better description, a “scientific approach to science.” In this age, which
Beck dubbed second or reflexive modernity, the challenge was to find ways
to employ the tools of modernity—of science, technology and democratic
debate—without succumbing to the ever-present temptations of glancing
backward to a more familiar age or engaging in denial.
This is not easy to do. There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with
the contemporary risks created by modern technological development. It
was not a matter of denouncing dictatorship or know-nothing populism.
Indeed, there is every reason to think that the problems of risk society will
be most acute precisely for those who fancy ourselves as particularly
reasonable and modern, because they cannot evade the dilemmas and
paradoxes that it generates.
There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the

contemporary risks created by modern technological
development.
Beck shared with the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s the
dawning awareness of the gigantic risks produced by modern economic
development. It was the nuclear question that catapulted risk society into
public consciousness. But the 1980s also saw the emergence of widespread
awareness both of climate change and the “emerging diseases paradigm.” If
climate change was the result of carbon emissions, the emergence of
viruses such as HIV, and the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 could be traced to the
intrusion of humans into delicate forest ecosystems and the vast animal
incubators of the agro-industrial complex. As citizens of successful
modernizing societies, we face all-pervasive risks that fundamentally blur
the distinction between the social and the natural. Beck could rightly claim
to be one of the first thinkers of what we know today as the Anthropocene.
An undated picture sent by Soviet television shows a man injured in the blast at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
A nurse attends to a COVID-19 patient while he is moved out of the Intensive Care Unit of the Pope John XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, Italy, on
April 7. MARCO DI LAURO/GETTY IMAGES
But Beck goes a step further. If it is true that we are now

faced with pervasive risks generated and brought upon us by the forces of
modernity and yet not accessible to our immediate senses, how do we
cope? Until you start suffering from radiation poisoning, until your fetus
suffers a horrific mutation, until you find your lungs flooding with
pneumonia, the threat of the radiation or a mystery bug is unreal,
inaccessible to the naked eye or immediate perception.
In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientific

knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous in advance of
encountering the dangers themselves. We become, as Beck puts it,
“incompetent in matters” of our “own affliction.” Alienated from our
faculties of assessment, we lose an essential part of our “cognitive
sovereignty.” The harmful, the threatening, the inimical lies in wait
everywhere, but whether it is inimical or friendly is “beyond one’s own
power of judgment.” We thus face a double shock: a threat to our health
and survival and a threat to our autonomy in gauging those threats. As we
react and struggle to reassert control, we have no option but to “become
small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization.” We take a
crash course in epidemiology and educate ourselves about “R zero.” But
that effort only sucks us deeper into the labyrinth.
In risk society, we become radically dependent on

specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and
what is not dangerous
The normal experiential logic of everyday thought is reversed. Rather than

starting from immediate experience and abstracting from there to general
claims about the world, the news of the day starts by reference to
mathematical formula, chemical tests, and medical judgements. The more
we rely on science, the more we find ourselves distanced from immediate
reality. Every encounter with our fellow citizens as we go about our normal
business is shadowed by a calculation of virtual risks and the probability of
contamination. The result is paradoxical. The path of science leads us into
a realm in which hidden forces, like the gods and demons of old, threaten
our earthly lives. A strange mixture of fear and calculation pursues us into
our “very dreams.” Whereas animistic religion once endowed nature with
spirits, we now view the world through the lens of omnipresent, latent
causalities. “Dangerous, hostile substances lie concealed behind the
harmless façades. Everything must be viewed with a double gaze, and can
only be correctly understood and judged through this doubling. The world
of the visible must be investigated, relativized and evaluated with respect
to a second reality, only existent in thought and yet concealed in the
world.”
As we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main

functions of a face mask is to remind oneself of invisible dangers and to
signal to others that one is taking those risks seriously. In the United States
they have become something like an article of faith, a way of indicating
publicly that one belongs to those who take “the science” seriously.
“Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued

contemporary is directed at something invisible.” “Omnipresent pollutants
and toxins” take the role of spirits. In our effort to cope we develop our
“own evasion rituals, incantations, intuition, suspicions and certainties.”
Of course, we insist, this isn’t exorcism. This is about science, medicine,
engineering, technology. But references to those authorities don’t actually
solve our problem. Because on most matters we care about, it turns out that
science speaks with many voices. Science is, at best, a rowdy, self-willed
choir with many people with different ideas of the tune they should be
singing. As we have discovered to our horror in 2020, anyone who professes
to believe that medicine, science, and public health expertise will by
themselves tell us how to act is either naive or in bad faith. Though
overwhelmed and underinformed, we cannot escape the responsibility of
both personal and collective political judgment.
Furthermore, the more we know, the more we realize that we are not the
only ones judging. Every interested party is picking and choosing its
sources. It is an enlightening but also shocking exposure to how the
sausage of modern knowledge is truly made. And as Beck reminds us, it
“would not be so dramatic and could be easily ignored if only one were not
dealing with very real and personal hazards.”
This is clearly a deeply modern world, saturated with technology and

expertise. But it is not a cookie-cutter image of modernity in which
scientific reason marches to victory over superstition and censorship.
Would that it were so clear-cut. Instead we find ourselves in a world in
which rationalism and skepticism are turning on themselves. Knowledge
comes not neatly packaged in the form of clearly recognizable truth but in
“admixtures” and “amalgams.” It is transported by “agents of knowledge in
their combination and opposition, their foundations, their claims, their
mistakes, their irrationalities,” all of which all too obviously go into
defining the possibility of their knowing the things they claim to know.
Knowledge comes not neatly packaged in the form of

clearly recognizable truth but in “admixtures” and
“amalgams.”
As Beck remarks, “this is a development of great ambivalence. It contains

the opportunity to emancipate social practice from science through
science.” We gain a far more realistic understanding of how scientific
results are generated and vaccines are produced. But the resulting
disillusionment and skepticism also has the potential to immunize
“prevailing ideologies and interested standpoints against enlightened
scientific claims, and throws the door open to a feudalization of scientific

knowledge practice through economic and political interests and ‘new
dogmas.’”
So, not only is technological progress churning up nature and generating

massive and dangerous blowback, but at the moment when we need it
most to orient ourselves, science and the government’s decisions based on
it forfeit their basis of legitimacy. And as the full extent of this shock sinks
in, it unleashes a third process of destabilization: We begin to wonder
about the broader narratives of progress and history within which we
understand our present.
A photo from October 1986 shows the damaged portion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine about five months after a major explosion on
April 26, 1986. ZUFAROV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
New graves dot the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Brazil, in May 2020 amid the rising death toll from the coronavirus
pandemic. MICHAEL DANTAS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
It is Beck’s openness to the ambiguity and complexity of

global development, his insistence on the multiplicity and surprising
quality of potential reactions to risk society, that helps to keep his book
relevant as a map for reading our current situation. If we go back to 1986,
Beck anticipated three ways in which societies might deal with the risks he
identified.
What Beck himself hoped for was what he called a cosmopolitan

micropolitics. This was a logical extension of his model of reflexive
modernity, in which not just science has been dethroned, but also the
previously demarcated sphere of national politics, dominated by
parliaments, sovereign governments, and territorial states. What Europe
witnessed starting in the 1980s was a double movement which, on the one
hand, dramatically reduced the intensity of political conflict between
parties in the parliamentary sphere and, at the same time, politicized

previously unpolitical realms such as gender relations, family life, and the
environment, spheres which he dubbed “sub-politics” or “micropolitics.”
For Beck this was no cause for lament. The challenge was to invigorate
subpolitics at whatever scale they operated. This could be intensely local,
as in struggles over road projects or airport runways. But it could also be
global in scope.
When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for Beck a demonstration
of a global micropolitics in action. New networks of “risk actors” led by
doctors, researchers, and independent public health experts overcame the
initial efforts at secrecy by the Chinese state. If the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) has had a Chernobyl moment, this was it. Bottom-up
environmental politics and social-justice activism was for Beck the model
of a new mode of politics. But one might also think of the remarkable effort
involved in stabilizing an institution such as the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change as a global authority in mapping the climate
emergency. It involves a tireless and massive effort of scientific politics.
Again and again climate scientists from all over the world, using different
models, starting from different assumptions, paid for by governments with
oppposing interests have struggled to reconcile their differences and define
reasonable bands of agreement. The reality of this kind of science is more
like the workings of a complex system of legal arbitration than the pristine
image of the lab bench.
When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for

Beck a demonstration of a global micropolitics in
action.
But, as Beck acknowledged, there were also at least two other possibilities.
One was a retro politics of going back to the future. This would be a politics
that aimed to restore the certainty of social development and the rule of
organized politics and scientific reason that had guided the first
modernity. The United States’ “war on terror” was one such attempt. It
turned a 21st century security risk into a conventional war against Saddam
Hussein’s regime in Iraq. It was a disaster. The most successful effort to
control risk society within the framework of a classic industrial modernity

is China. Its response to the COVID-19 crisis has put that on full display.
COVID-19 was contained and CCP rule ensured by a full-bore mobilization
of societal discipline, targeted deployment of medical spending, and state
power, all of it clad in the guise of what the regime calls 21st-century
Marxism, a self-confident narrative of modernization and progress. There
is no room for questioning the modern epic of the China dream. The lack of
a positive attitude is enough to trigger suspicion.
Another response with which we have become all too familiar in the
contemporary United States is a retreat from the vertiginous whirl of self-
reflexive rationality toward new taboos, superstition, rigidification, and
denial. This for Beck was not to be understood as a hangover from
traditional folkways, but as a new superstition raised in response to new
threats. Given the spiraling uncertainty of risk society, it was hardly
surprising that some might react this way. During the response to COVID-
19, it was all too easy to find oneself torn between two camps described by
Beck in his article on Chernobyl: “Some refuse to perceive the dangers at
all, while others energetically insist on blanket condemnations in the name
of ‘self-protection’ or the preservation of ‘life on this earth.’” How was one
to decide between these positions? The polarization of views in the
eddying arguments of risk society could easily extend to science itself. If,
by an honest fallibilistic account, “science is only a disguised mistake in
abeyance … then where does anyone derive the right to believe only in
certain risks?” A realistic skepticism about scientific authority all too easily
shaded into a general obfuscation of risks. It was, Beck admitted in Risk
Society, a “knife’s edge,” in which debates about invisible risks mutated
into “sort of modern seance” with the dial on the Ouija board being moved
by rival scientific and counterscientific analyses.
Another response with which we have become all too

familiar in the contemporary United States is a retreat
from the vertiginous whirl of self-reflexive rationality
“Once the invisible has been let in,” Beck wrote, “it will soon not be just the
spirits of pollutants that determine the thought and the life of people. This
can all be disputed, it can polarize, or it can fuse together. New

communities and alternative communities arise, whose world views,
norms and certainties are grouped around the center of invisible threats.”
How can one not think of our ongoing struggle over face masks?
And then there is denial. Outside a totalitarian setting, a social problem

such as a labor dispute cannot easily be settled by denial. But perceived
risks “can always be interpreted away (as long they have not already
occurred).” Barring the actual disaster, mounting anxiety may be relieved
simply by pushing the danger out of mind. Risk is a matter of perception;
therefore, it originates “in knowledge and norms, and they can thus be
enlarged or reduced in knowledge and norms, or simply displaced from the
screen of consciousness.” The awareness of modern risks was not a one-
way street. It was reversible. “Troubled times and generations can be
succeeded by others for which fear, tamed by interpretations, is a basic
element of thought and experience. Here the threats are held captive in the
cognitive cage of their always unstable ‘non-existence.’” Later generations
would look back and mock the fears that had once “so upset the ‘old folks.’”
A recurring refrain in the response to COVID-19, notably from the populists
of the Americas, whether in the United States, Mexico, or Brazil, has been
essentially this: We will just have to get used to it. After all, we live with flu.
It will blow over.
As Beck warned more than 30 years ago, we may be “at the beginning of a
historical process of habituation. It may be that the next generation, or the
one after that, will no longer be upset at pictures of birth defects, like those
of tumor-covered fish and birds that now circulate around the world, just as
we are no longer upset today by violated values, the new poverty and a
constant high level of mass unemployment.” The word out of the White
House in the summer of 2020 is that Trump’s strategists are looking
forward to the day when news of tens of thousands of new cases per day no
longer ruffles the headlines.
Beck was at heart a sociologist more than a critical theorist or normative

political theoretician. He did not denounce the development of denial or
unreason so much as chart and explain it. In dealing with risk society, one
had to reckon with its basic motive force: the powerful emotion of fear.
This was the basic question it posed:
“How can we cope with the fear, if we cannot overcome the causes of the
fear? How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately
forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears—and not just
on the vapors that the volcano exudes?”
In 2020, that question is even more pressing than it was in 1986.
German writer Ulrich Beck in Milano, Italy, on Sept. 18, 2014. LEONARDO CENDAMO/GETTY IMAGES
Beck is no longer with us to help us with the answer. He died

suddenly of a heart attack on New Year’s Day in 2015 while walking home
from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Risk Society had made him into one of the emblematic figures of European
social science of his day. It had been translated into 35 languages. There are
no fewer than 8,000 articles in Chinese academic journals that refer to
Beck’s work. Somewhat surprisingly, Risk Society did not appear in English
until 1992 and, relative to his standing in Europe and Asia, Beck’s impact
on the academic scene in the United States was slight. For the United
States’ social-scientific mainstream, he lacked rigor. Starting in the 1980s,
behavioral economics and experimental social science came ever more to
the fore as ways of accounting for how people form judgments under
uncertainty. For intellectual entrepreneurs of the American left, who trade
in exotic continental imports, Beck was not radical enough. They preferred
their theory French. In political terms, Beck, like his friend and
collaborator Anthony Giddens, was associated during the 1990s and 2000s
with the Third Way of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the red-green
coalition in Germany.
But it is not just academic politics that accounts for Beck’s muted reception
in the United States. One must also ask how far Beck’s sketch of the
contemporary cultural condition actually extended across the Atlantic.
Beck himself clearly drew inspiration from the American environmental
politics of the 1960s and 1970s, which led the world in turning scientific
research to critical purposes. Silicon Valley’s hybrid of tech and New Age
religion could be cited as a classic instance of Beck’s second modernity—
immensely wealthy tech wizards unafraid to seek enlightenment wherever
they might find it, whether in yoga, outlandish diets, or shamanic outings
to Burning Man. But the United States’ national politics presented a very
different picture. What was one to make of a political system convulsed by
arguments over the interpretation of an 18th-century constitution, the
merits of teaching the biblical version of creation, and the veracity of
climate science? There was plenty of opposition to climate politics from
self-interested fossil fuel businesses in Europe, but few if any mainstream
voices questioning the laboriously established scientific consensus. And in
the United States all this came cloaked in a quasi-theological nationalism,
embodied in the country’s sacrosanct way of life.
In the United States of 2020, faced with the confluence of evangelical

religion, the Trump presidency, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, it
is tempting to conclude that Beck’s announcement of a second modernity
was premature. It is tempting to rally the liberal troops and to announce
that in the United States today it is not the struggles of reflexive modernity
—the self-generation of uncertainty and risk—that need to be fought so
much as the battles of the first modernity, against superstition, atavism,
and obscurantism.
This may be appealing. But it ignores the obvious fact that the vortex of
televangelism, a reality-TV presidency, and viral Internet memes is itself a
product of our high-tech capitalism, unimaginable in an earlier era. To
answer them with a retreat to rationalism is to indulge in what the British
sociologist Will Davies has recently termed “Enlightenment kitsch.” What
we are living through is indeed Beck’s second modernity, just in a more
conflicted and catastrophic version than he ever imagined. Hence,
perhaps, the attraction of the Chernobyl scenario. How pleasant to imagine
that our problems are those of the late Soviet regime and that what we need
is simply a dose of liberty and perestroika, when the real path of progress is
both more ambiguous and more sweeping, because it implicates the
country as a whole.
If Beck’s readership in the United States was thin, the same was not true in
East Asia, where since the 1980s the German sociologist cultivated a
devoted following. Beck was attractive notably for progressive Korean
social scientists dedicated to the critique of their national model of
authoritarian modernity. For Beck, the eagerness with which his concept of
second modernity was adapted by Asian social scientists was living proof
of the dynamic open-endedness of the reality he was trying to describe. In
such collaborations a process was set in motion that provincialized
European concepts and history without consigning them to irrelevance.
Japan, South Korea, and China were undergoing an industrial revolution
more rapid than anything experienced in the West. They were huge
laboratories of the Anthropocene and the churning appropriation of
nature.
If Beck’s readership in the United States was thin, the

same was not true in East Asia, where since the 1980s
the German sociologist cultivated a devoted following.
In July 2014, Beck visited Seoul and laid out the implications of his model
of risk society for thinking about crises such as the Japanese nuclear
accident at Fukushima in 2011, the Sewol Ferry Tragedy in Korea in 2014,
and China’s plague of air pollution. Beck was particularly keen to suggest
ways in which East Asia might creatively overcome the bitter legacy of
20th-century history, if not at the level of national politics, then through

the subpolitics of cooperation between the megacities of the region that
were fast emerging as global hubs. The progressive administration of the
city of Seoul launched a city lab to incorporate Beck’s ideas into their urban
planning. Shocked by his sudden death in the spring of 2015, his South
Korean collaborators staged a Buddhist commemorative service at which
the mayor of Seoul, at the time one of the leading lights of the Korean
opposition, gave a funeral oration.
Beck would no doubt have appreciated the syncretic gesture. Five years
later, he would have been even more pleased to see the entire world taking
lessons from a progressive South Korean government on how to handle the
COVID-19 crisis. In the face of bitter opposition from medical interest
groups, the South Korean government effectively mobilized coalitions of
businesses and scientists to deliver fast and effective testing and tracing.
Rather than relying on clichés about Confucian conformity to collective
norms, they set out to build trust through transparency and effective
delivery. Not only did the Democratic Party government contain the
epidemic, but it even managed to hold a national election in the midst of
the crisis and win it handsomely. The country offers an example, in what
remains of this pandemic, of how to get risk society right.

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8/2/2020 Ulrich Beck Is the World's Most Important Pandemic Intellectual

THE BIG THINK

The Sociologist Who Could

We all know the Chernobyl script. A badly designed reactor

When COVID-19 struck, we wondered whether it might be Chinese

Beck argued that the omnipresence of large-scale threats of global scope,

Beck was in many ways an emblematic ﬁgure of postwar

Beck’s contribution in Risk Society was to oﬀer a compelling sociological

The West’s ﬁrst wave of modernization had been carried forward by an

There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the

But Beck goes a step further. If it is true that we are now

In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientiﬁc

In risk society, we become radically dependent on

The normal experiential logic of everyday thought is reversed. Rather than

As we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main

“Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued

This is clearly a deeply modern world, saturated with technology and

Knowledge comes not neatly packaged in the form of

As Beck remarks, “this is a development of great ambivalence. It contains

scientiﬁc claims, and throws the door open to a feudalization of scientiﬁc

So, not only is technological progress churning up nature and generating

It is Beck’s openness to the ambiguity and complexity of

What Beck himself hoped for was what he called a cosmopolitan

parties in the parliamentary sphere and, at the same time, politicized

When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for

control risk society within the framework of a classic industrial modernity

Another response with which we have become all too

can all be disputed, it can polarize, or it can fuse together. New

And then there is denial. Outside a totalitarian setting, a social problem

Beck was at heart a sociologist more than a critical theorist or normative

In 2020, that question is even more pressing than it was in 1986.

Beck is no longer with us to help us with the answer. He died

In the United States of 2020, faced with the conﬂuence of evangelical

If Beck’s readership in the United States was thin, the

20th-century history, if not at the level of national politics, then through

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