Description
Book SynopsisTwenty years ago Ulrich Beck published Risk Society , a book that called our attention to the dangers of environmental catastrophes and changed the way we think about contemporary societies. During the last two decades, the dangers highlighted by Beck have taken on new forms and assumed ever greater significance.
Trade Review“A fascinating examination of the risk society of the twenty-first century. Ulrich Beck details the new world order where terrorism and global climate change haunt our lives and engender some powerful new risks and new modes of politics. This book importantly draws together many of Beck’s themes for examining the main lineaments of the new World at Risk.”
John Urry, University of Lancaster “Beck deploys the concept of risk as a sharply focused flashlight that allows him to see what is typically obscured by dominant notions and explanations. This becomes a process of discovery, rare in the social sciences today, concerned as they are with proof. He brilliantly conceptualizes these discoveries in terms of categories not usually used in risk analysis, such as cosmopolitanism. A must-read book.”
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: Staging Global Risk 1
2 Relations of Defi nition as Relations of Domination: Who Decides What is and is Not a Risk? 24
3 The 'Cosmopolitan Moment' of World Risk Society or: Enforced Enlightenment 47
4 Clash of Risk Cultures or: The Overlapping of the State of Normalcy and the State of Exception 67
5 Global Public Sphere and Global Subpolitics or: How Real is Catastrophic Climate Change? 81
6 The Provident State or: On the Antiquatedness of Linear Pessimism Concerning Progress 109
7 Knowledge or Non-Knowing? Two Perspectives of 'Reflexive Modernization' 115
8 The Insurance Principle: Criticism and Counter-Criticism 129
9 Felt War, Felt Peace: Staging Violence 140
10 Global Inequality, Local Vulnerability: The Conflict Dynamics of Environmental Hazards Must be Studied within the Framework of Methodological Cosmopolitanism 160
11 Critical Theory of World Risk Society 187
12 Dialectics of Modernity: How the Crises of Modernity Follow from the Triumphs of Modernity 212
Notes 235
References and Bibliography 243
Index 261
