World at Risk

Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich.

“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

• Acknowledgements vii1 Introduction: Staging Global Risk 12 Relations of Defi nition as Relations of Domination: Who Decides What is and is Not a Risk? 243 The 'Cosmopolitan Moment' of World Risk Society or: Enforced Enlightenment 474 Clash of Risk Cultures or: The Overlapping of the State of Normalcy and the State of Exception 675 Global Public Sphere and Global Subpolitics or: How Real is Catastrophic Climate Change? 816 The Provident State or: On the Antiquatedness of Linear Pessimism Concerning Progress 1097 Knowledge or Non-Knowing? Two Perspectives of 'Reflexive Modernization' 1158 The Insurance Principle: Criticism and Counter-Criticism 1299 Felt War, Felt Peace: Staging Violence 14010 Global Inequality, Local Vulnerability: The Conflict Dynamics of Environmental Hazards Must be Studied within the Framework of Methodological Cosmopolitanism 16011 Critical Theory of World Risk Society 18712 Dialectics of Modernity: How the Crises of Modernity Follow from the Triumphs of Modernity 212Notes 235References and Bibliography 243Index 261