Beck - Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk

For
Etty Hillesum,
whose diaries accompanied me
in the writing of this book

According to a Red Cross report, Etty Hillesum was
killed in Auschwitz on 30 November 1943; her
parents and brothers also lost their lives there.

English translation Polity Press 1995
First published in Germany as Genengifte: Die organisierte
Unverantwortlichkeit
Copyright Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1988

This translation first published in 1995 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers.

Reprinted 2002

Published with the financial support of Inter Nationes, Bonn

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0 7456 07632
ISBN 0 7456 13772 (pbk)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

Translators Note

Several problems face the translator of this book. First, and most obvious, is the fact that it was written before the removal of the Iron Curtain in 1989, and hence some anachronisms will strike the reader. Second, English frequently offers several words where only one is available to the German-speaker and -writer. Thus Sicherheit can be translated as security, safety or certainty, depending upon the context. I have tried to give the appropriate English word, at the cost of a loss of linguistic word-play. Thus reactor safety (Reaktorsicherheit) is mentioned in the context of the security state (Sicherheitsstaat). Similarly, Politik can be translated as either politics or policy; and so forth. Third, and last, a direct translation of the cadences of Ulrich Becks prose would appear impossibly involuted, at times, to the English eye. As far as I could, I have shortened some of the longer sentences, sometimes changing the order of clauses.

Amos Weisz

Preface

The thoughts expressed here are the fruit of many conversations and discussions. Above all, I have woven into the fabric of the book ideas that I owe to my life with my wife and colleague Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Peter Berger, Wolfgang Bonss, Ronald Hitzler, Christoph Lau, Maria Rerrich, Renate Schtz and Rainer Wolf made trenchant comments and gave helpful advice on the books structure. I also thank Reiner Keller, Gerhard Mutz and Claudia Wurst for giving greater precision to some of my formulations.

Many people have struggled through the false turns of the early drafts and given unstinting advice from which subsequent readers will benefit, especially Peter Gross, Jobst Giinther, Heinz Hartmann and Dieter Mertens. Angelika Schacht and Gerlinde Muller have also been endlessly reliable both in typing the text and in making sure that I was left time in which I was free to write.

I thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) for their generous support.

Lastly I acknowledge with gratitude the contribution of the gleaming Starnberger See.

Ulrich Beck

Introduction: The Immortality of Industrial Society and the Contents of this Book

The theme of this book is the paradigm confusion involved in the management of hazards. The challenges of the atomic, chemical and genetic age at the turn of the twenty-first century are discussed in conceptual and prescriptive terms that derive from the early industrial society of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A multiple disjunction separates the risks of early industrialization from the hazards of technologically advanced civilisation.

This security system, which anticipates social provision for the worst conceivable case, broke down with the advent of large-scale (nuclear, chemical, ecological, genetic) hazards. Accidents now frequently cause irreversible damage and destruction that may have a determin-able beginning but no foreseeable end. Yet it is not only accident statistics that fail to address the historically unprecedented fact of artificial disasters of undeterminable extent; the guiding idea of economic compensation, which has prevailed hitherto, also fails to meet the case.

These open-ended, ultimately irremediable large-scale hazards are, however, forced upon the heightened safety consciousness of citizens with every means at the disposal of state authority. In so far as the paradigm confusion, upon which industry and politics have built their safety guarantees, is revealed in the sequence of disasters, near-disasters or hushed-up disasters, a great deal happens, even if it does not appear to. The social explosiveness of hazards develops its own political momentum: risks consciously taken must be socially answered for, as they endanger the lives of everyone and stand in open contradiction to the states institutionalized pledges of safety and welfare.

It is not only seals in the North and Baltic Seas that suffer agonizing deaths. Chemicals that are today an integral part of the civilized world have arrived in profusion at the penguin colonies of the Antarctic. Yet the law is circumscribed by the unquestioned assumptions of a different epoch; it can intervene only when the sole culprit, that vestige of tradition, has been apprehended in the world of chemicals. In the legalized international traffic in harmful and toxic substances, the sole culprit is also an extinct species. As long as the universal dissemination of poisons is ensured by the absence or laxity of maximum pollution levels, holding a single individual liable is comparable to trying to drain the ocean with a sieve. This is precisely what organized irresponsibility means. The interpretation of the principle of causation in individual terms, which is the legal foundation for hazard aversion, protects the perpetrators it is supposed to bring to book. It is absurd how an ostensibly protective judicial system, with all its laws and bureaucratic pretensions, almost perfectly transforms collective guilt into general acquittal.