Ulrich Beck - World at Risk

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Copyright Ulrich Beck 2007. First published in German as Weltrisikogesellschaft Suhrkamp, 2007.

This English edition Polity Press, 2009.

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Acknowledgements

Risk Society was published in German in 1986. In 1999, World Risk Society appeared in English and was translated into more than ten languages, though not into German. The attempt to translate it into German in a lightly revised version proved to be untenable. Too much has occurred in the meantime, the learning curve in responding to global risks is simply too vast. Hence this new book.

There was no shortage of reasons for writing it. They reside, first, in the endless chain of events in which reality and the mass media are co-authoring ever new chapters of world risk society. What seemed larger than life twenty years ago has proved to be the script that reality has been following: We are all trapped in the global danger zone (Tagesanzeiger, Zurich, 2006). On the other hand, the trend towards a globalization of risks is also reflected in the reception of Risk Society. My analyses have by now been translated into more than thirty languages and have triggered heated debates across nations and specialist fields in sociology and political science, in law and history, in philosophy, anthropology, ecology and engineering. Furthermore, studies on diverse topics in the most varied empirical contexts have contributed to articulating the contours, paradoxes and contradictions of (world) risk society. This worldwide discourse on Risk Society stimulated me to further reflection and to write World at Risk. I would like to mention here just the inspiring works of Joost van Loon (Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence) and Piet Strydom (Risk, Environment and Society: Ongoing Debates, Current Issues and Future Prospects).

Earlier versions of one or more of the chapters presented here were commented upon by Jakob Arnoldi, Boris Holzer, Edgar Grande, Christoph Lau, Daniel Levy, Stefan May, Martin Muslow, Angelika Poferl and Natan Sznaider, to whom I am also sincerely grateful. The context for this book was provided by cooperation and discussion within the Collaborative Research Centre Reflexive Modernization, which enjoys the generous support of the German Research Foundation. Without Raimund Fellinger, friend and editor, this book would never have been written. I would also like to thank Almut Kleine and Waltraud Zoldos for their work in typing the manuscript.

On this occasion, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim encouraged me to tame my academicism and to indulge my pleasure in writing. Hence this book is addressed not to sociologists alone but to all of those who are keen to understand our age of man-made uncertainties.

Introduction: Staging Global Risk

The academic debate concerning climate change is over, but the political and moral responses have reached a new level. Human beings, as researchers have established with a unanimity rare with such multi-faceted issues, bear the primary blame for global warming. The real novelty, perhaps even the historic message of this report, is the conclusiveness with which all evasions and doubts concerning the human causation of climate change are dispelled.

Mller-Jung 2007 (referring to IPCC 2007)