Ulrich Beck Quotes

But where danger lurks, the saving powers also grow.

Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world.

The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads.

The most convincing and enduring foe of the global financial economy ultimately is the global financial economy itself. - Ulrich Beck

Increasingly the individuals who want to live together are, or more precisely are becoming, the legislators of their own way of life, the judges of their own transgressions, the priests who absolve their own sins and the therapists who loosen the bonds of their own past.

What ‘relations of production’ in capitalist society represented for Karl Marx, ‘relations of definition’ represent for risk society. Both concern relations of domination (Beck 2002; Goldblatt 1996). Among the relations of definition are the rules, institutions and capabilities which specify how risks are to be identified in particular contexts (for example, within nation-states, but also in relations between them). They form at the legal, epistemological and cultural power matrix in which risk politics is organized (see chapters 9 and 10). Relations of definition power can accordingly be explored through four clusters of questions:

In diesem Jahr ging es darum, eine Politik zu beenden, für die der Soziologe Ulrich Beck den durchaus bewundernd gemeinten Begriff des »Merkiavellismus« gefunden hatte. Eine Politik, die ihre Ziele nicht benennt und auch nicht die Fahrzeuge, mit denen sie uns dorthin mitnehmen möchte. Eine Politik, die auf das Ausstrahlen von Ruhe setzt und nicht auf Diskurs, auf permanentes Weiter-so statt auf die Aufklärung des mündigen Bürgers.

In all previously existing democracies, there have been two types of authority: one coming from the people and the other coming from the enemy. Enemy stereotypes empower. Enemy stereotypes have the highest conflict priority. They make it possible to cover up and force together all the other social antitheses. One could say that enemy stereotypes constitute an alternative energy source for consensus, a raw material becoming scarce with the development of modernity. They grant exemption from democracy by its own consent [143].

But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.

Reduced to a formula, wealth is hierarchic, smog is democratic. Ulrich Beck

Change in society, social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.

Ulrich Beck may be seen as one of its most prominent interpreters, coining the concept of the ‘elevator effect’ in the 1980s to describe the new social mobility.43 In a society of economic growth—according to this metaphor—all strata, from wage earners through to the wealthy, stand together in an elevator and rise together. Inequalities between strata or social classes, in this scenario, are certainly not abolished, but they play a less significant role when everyone becomes more prosperous: ‘Class society as a whole is taken a stage higher. There is a collective rise in income, education, mobility, rights, science, mass consumption—despite all the new and persisting inequalities.’44 Beck linked this diagnosis with one of the most influential social developments of modernity: individualization.

When risk appeared on the stage, God had to renounce his role as lord of the universe