Living In The World Risk Society

Economy and Society Volume 35 Number 3 August 2006: 329 Á 345

Living in the world risk society
A Hobhouse Memorial Public Lecture given on Wednesday 15 February 2006 at the London School of Economics

Ulrich Beck

Abstract
In a world risk society, we must distinguish between ecological and financial dangers, which can be conceptualized as side effects, and the threat from terroristnetworks as intentional catastrophes; the principle of deliberately exploiting the vulnerability of modern civil society replaces the principle of chance and accident. Keywords: risk; catastrophe; not-knowing; enlightenment function of world risk society; cosmopolitan realpolitik .

The narrative of risk is a narrative of irony. This narrative deals with the involuntary satire, the optimisticfutility, with which the highly developed institutions of modern society Á science, state, business and military Á attempt to anticipate what cannot be anticipated. Socrates has left us to make sense of the puzzling sentence: I know that I know nothing. The fatal irony, into which scientific-technical society plunges us is, as a consequence of its perfection, much more radical: we do not know what it iswe don’t know Á but from this dangers arise, which threaten mankind! The perfect example here is provided by the debate about climate change. In 1974, about forty-five years after the discovery of the cooling agent CFC, of all things, the chemists
Ulrich Beck, British Journal of Sociology Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE,UK. Copyright # 2006 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/03085140600844902

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Rowland and Molina put forward the hypothesis that CFCs destroy the ozone layer of the stratosphere and, as a result, increased ultraviolet radiation would reach the earth. The chain of unforeseen secondary effects would lead to climate changes, whichthreaten the basis of existence of mankind. When coolants were invented no one could know or even suspect that they would make such a major contribution to global warming. Whoever believes in not-knowing (like the US government) increases the danger of climate catastrophe. Or put more generally: the more emphatically the existence of world risk society is denied, the more easily it can become a reality.The ignorance of the globalization of risk increases the globalization of risk. The greatest military power in history shields itself with an anti-missile defence system costing billions of dollars. Is it not also a bitter irony that this power should be struck to the heart of its security and self-confidence by an action that was utterly improbable according to every logic of risk, when suicideterrorists succeeded in turning commercial passenger aircraft into rockets, which destroyed symbols of American world power? The irony of risk here is that rationality, that is, the experience of the past, encourages anticipation of the wrong kind of risk, the one we believe we can calculate and control, whereas the disaster arises from what we do not know and cannot calculate. The bittervarieties of this risk irony are virtually endless; among them is the fact, that, in order to protect their populations from the danger of terrorism, states increasingly limit civil rights and liberties, with the result that in the end the open, free society may be abolished, but the terrorist threat is by no means averted. The dark irony here is that, while very general risk-induced doubts in thebenevolence of the promises of governments to protect their citizens lead to criticisms of the inefficiency of scholarly and state authorities, critics are blind to the possibilities of erecting (or expanding) the authoritarian state on this very inefficiency. Perhaps now you will recognize what the question which I have raised and want to address in this lecture is aiming at: I want to investigate the...