Beck Back in the 19th Century: Towards a Genealogy of Risk Society

Abstract

There is today an assumption, shared by most thinkers of post modernity that for about two generations we have been experiencing a complete transformation of our relationship with science, progress and risk. The story goes like this: as modern technologies have radically changed the scale of human action, risks have changed in nature; they are global, concern future generations, and pose threats to human nature and/or existence. Consequently, two pillars of industrial society have been undermined. First, the consensus on progress that linked technological achievements and hope of a better future has been breached: anxiety dominates our thought and technological choices now depend on the outcome of social conflicts. Second, the traditional after-the-event management of risk by insurance companies, fire brigades and suchlike, which dealt with the consequences of technological accidents, is rendered inadequate by new major risks that necessitate a new kind of political prudence, summarized by what is known as "the precautionary principle." Landmark writers of social theory have coined new labels to name our epoch and express its novelty: "risk society" as opposed to "industrial society," "reflexive modernization," 1 "second modernization," 2 "high modernity," 3 or "mode II society;" 4 while 1

The co-production of science and waterscapes: The case of the Seine and the Rhône Rivers, France

“…This resulted in a spatial zoning of water uses, limiting irrigation and fishing downstream and restricting the development of cities and industries upstream. Riparian inhabitants would often complain about local damages caused by industrial and urban waste, but most of them received compensation through out-of-court settlements (Fressoz, 2007). There were demands for clean-up operations but not at the national level where water quality was not an issue.…”

Waste and ‘Everyday Environmentalism’ in Modern Britain

“…The evolution of modern systems of waste disposal incorporated the reproduction requirements of capitalist social space into discourses of liberal governmentality, bureaucratic ' expertise', and environmental risk (Beck, 1992;Fressoz, 2007).…”

Picturing the future‐conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change

“…Such fears evolved alongside – or were mediated by – fears about the environmental repercussions of such unprecedented changes in the human condition, with climate often functioning as an explanatory variable long before concerns about greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. Fressoz ; Locher and Fressoz ). In the nineteenth century technological utopianism jostled with millenarian dystopianism, the latter often animated by fears of violent tectonic shifts and catastrophic meteorite strikes.…”