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Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University
in Munich and at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
His books include: Conversations with Ulrich Beck (2004); What is
Globalization? (2000); World Risk Society (1999); The Reinvention of
Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (1997);
Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the
Modern Social Order (1995, with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash);
Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society
(1995); Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (1994); and Risk Society:
Towards a New Modernity (1992).
Joshua Yates is a Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies
in Culture and the Center on Religion and Democracy and a doctoral can-
didate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His
dissertation focuses on the role of humanitarian organizations in the
processes of cultural globalization.
What is risk society and how did it emerge?
Risk society means that we live in a world out of control. There is
nothing certain but uncertainty. But lets go into details. The term
risk has two radically different meanings. It applies in the first place
to a world governed entirely by the laws of probability, in which every-
thing is measurable and calculable. But the word is also commonly
used to refer to non-quantitative uncertainties, to risks that cannot be
known. When I speak about risk society, it is in this latter sense of
AN I NTERVI EW WI TH UL RI CH BECK
ON F EAR AND RI S K S OCI ETY
Joshua Yates
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manufactured uncertainties. These true uncertainties, enforced by
rapid technological innovations and accelerated societal responses, are
creating a fundamentally new global risk landscape. In all these new
uncertain risk technologies, we are separated from the possible end
results by an ocean of not knowing.
Can you give me an example?
A few years ago, the U.S. Congress gave a scientific commission the
task of developing a symbolic language that would make clear the dan-
ger posed by the U.S. storage site for atomic waste. The problem to be
solved was the following: How should the concepts and symbols be
constituted in order to communicate to those living 10,000 years from
now? The commission was made up of physicists, anthropologists, lin-
guists, brain researchers, psychologists, molecular biologists, gerontol-
ogists, artists, etc. First of all, they had to clear up a simple question:
will the U.S.A. exist at all in ten thousand years? The answer was, of
course, simple: U.S.A. forever! However the key problemhow it is
possible today to begin a conversation 10,000 years into the future
eventually proved to be insoluble. The commission looked for exam-
ples from the oldest symbols of humanity, studied the ruins of
Stonehenge (1500 B.C.E.) and the pyramids, researched the reception
of Homer and the Bible, and heard explanations of the life cycle of
documents. These, however, only reached a few thousand, not ten
thousand years into the past.
At the speed of its technological development, the modern world
increases the global difference between the language of quantifiable
risks in which we think and act and the world of non-quantifiable inse-
curity that we likewise create. Through our past decisions about atom-
ic energy and our present decisions about the use of genetic technology,
human genetics, nanotechnology, and computer science, we unleash
unforeseeable, uncontrollable, indeed, even incommunicable conse-
quences that threaten life on earth.
What, then, is actually new about risk society? Havent all societies
always been surrounded by the dangers that those societies were first
formed to provide defense against?
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The concept of risk is a modern one. It presupposes decisions that
attempt to make the unforeseeable consequences of civilizational deci-
sions foreseeable and controllable. If one, for example, says that the risk
of cancer for smokers is at a certain level and the risk of catastrophe in
an atomic energy plant is at a certain level, this implies that risks are
avoidable negative consequences of decisions that seem calculable, such
as the likelihood of sickness or accident, and thereby are not natural
catastrophes. The novelty of the risk society lies in the fact that our civ-
ilizational decisions involve global consequences and dangers, and these
radically contradict the institutionalized language of controlindeed
the promise of controlthat is radiated to the global public in the
event of catastrophe (as in Chernobyl, and also in the terror attacks on
New York and Washington). Precisely this constitutes the political
explosiveness of the risk society. This explosiveness has its center in the
mass-mediated public sphere, in politics, in the bureaucracy, in the
economy, though it is not necessarily contiguous with a particular event
to which it is connected. Political explosiveness can be described and
measured neither in the language of risk, nor in scientific formulas. In
it explodesif I am permitted this metaphorresponsibility, claims
to rationality, and legitimization through contact with reality. The other
side of the admitted presence of danger is the failure of the institutions
that derive their authority from their purported mastery of such dan-
ger. In this way, the social birth of a global danger is as much unlike-
ly as it is a dramatic, indeed traumatic, world-shattering one. In the
experience of shock radiated by the mass media, it becomes recogniz-
able; to quote Goya: the slumber of reason creates monsters.
Fear of various dangers, hazards, and the unknown have constituted
the most basic of human experiences, drives, emotions, etc. In your
book Risk Society, you argue that the driving force in the class soci-
ety can be summarized in the phrase: I am hungry! The movement
set in motion by the risk society, on the other hand, is expressed in
the statement: I am afraid! The commonality of anxiety takes the
place of the commonality of need. Could you say more about fear as
a driving force in risk society? How does fear in a risk society differ
from its formulations in other kinds of societiesfor example, feu-
dal-agrarian societies? Do you agree with Anthony Giddens state-
ment that Our age is not more dangerousnot more riskythan
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those of earlier generations, but the balance of risks and dangers
has shifted.
1
We dont know if we live in a world any more risky than those of earli-
er generations. It is not the quantity of risk, but the quality of control
orto be more precisethe known uncontrollability of the conse-
quences of civilizational decisions, that makes the historical difference.
Therefore I use the term manufactured uncertainties. The institu-
tionalized expectation of control, even the leading ideas of certainty
and rationality are collapsing. Not climate change, ecological disas-
ters, threats of transnational terrorism, B.S.E., etc., per se, but the grow-
ing insight that we live in an interconnected world that is getting out of
control, creates the novelty of the risk society. The challenges of the
global risks at the beginning of the 21
st
century are discussed in con-
ceptual and prescriptive terms that derive from the first modernity of
the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. The risks we are confronted with can-
not be delimited spatially, temporarily, or socially; they encompass
nation-states, military alliances, and all social classes, and, by their very
nature, present new kinds of challenges to the institutions designed for
their control. The established rules of attribution and liabilitycausal-
ity, guilt, and justicebreak down. That means that their careful appli-
cation to research and jurisdiction has the contrary effect: the dangers
increase and their anonymization is legitimated. So the main difference
between the premodern culture of fear and the second modern culture
of fear is: in premodernity the dangers and fears could be attributed to
gods or God or nature and the promise of modernity was to overcome
those threats by more modernization and more progressmore science,
more market economy, better and new technologies, safety standards,
etc. In the age of risk the threats we are confronted with cannot be
attributed to God or nature but to modernization and progress
itself. Thus the culture of fear derives from the paradoxical fact that the
institutions that are designed to control produced uncontrollability.
1
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Rittner (London:
Sage, 1992) 49. Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping
Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000) 52.
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If, under the conditions of risk, our focus is more and more on
hazards which are neither visible nor perceptible to the victims; haz-
ards that in some cases may not even take effect within the lifespans
of those affected, but instead during those of their children; hazards
in any case that require the sensory organs of sciencetheories,
experiments, measuring instrumentsin order to become visible or
interpretable as hazards at all,
2
what happens to our ability to pur-
sue justice in a risk society?
There is no easy answer to this question. Have a look, for example, at
one of the most famous philosophies and moral theories of justice of
our time, created by John Rawls. He conceptualizes justice in a frame
of reference built on two outdated premises: first methodological
nationalism, which means the question of justice is perceived in
nation-state categories; second he concentrates his theory on the distri-
bution of goods and neglects the distribution of bads or risks,
which follows, as I argue in my book, a quite different logic. So the
grammar of the social and political we live, think, and act in, is
becoming historically obsolete, but nevertheless continues to govern
our thinking and acting. Take the terrorist threat, for example. The vio-
lence of September 11, 2001 stands for the failure of traditional state-
based concepts like war and peace, friend and foe, war and
crime to seize, analyze, and propose approaches to the new moral,
social, and political realities. Your question, how to redefine justice in a
risk society, has not even been picked up so far.
What does power mean in a risk society?
In risk conflicts, the central question of power is indeed a question of
definition. It is the question of who, with what legal and intellectual
resources, gets to decide what counts as a risk, what counts as a
cause, and what counts as a cost. The question of determining who
is responsible, and who has to bear the burden of paying for damages,
has been transmuted into a battle over the rules of evidence and the
laws of responsibility. And the reason for this is because at bottom the
2
Beck 27 (italics in original).
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real clash is between the idea that someone is responsible and the idea
that no one is responsible.
Is this the reason why you talk about organized irresponsibility as a
characteristic of a risk society?
Yes. Politicians say they are not in charge, that they at most regulate the
framework for the market. Scientific experts say they merely create
technological opportunities: they dont decide how they are imple-
mented. Businesses say they are simply responding to consumer
demand. Society has become a laboratory with nobody responsible for
the outcome of the experiment.
In the past, societies have managed to provide answers, or at least
institutions that offered officially sanctioned answers, to the most
difficult questions and lifes uncertainties. With the advent of modern
society, the authority of traditional institutions (and their answers)
lost credibility and were largely replaced by new institutions and
experts who provided modern answers. In risk societies, part of
the dilemma is that the answers of experts themselves have lost (to
a degree, if not completely) their ability to provide certainty: where
once we could have faith in the risk assessments of experts, today it
seems that we must assess for ourselves the risk of trusting expert
opinion. If this is an accurate depiction of our present circumstance,
to whom do we turn for answers or how do we individually and col-
lectively live without certainty, without assurance of safety?
The picture you paint is quite correct. But risk is a very ambivalent
concept. It is not only negatively perceived and valued but also posi-
tively. In fact, the word risk seems to have come into English through
Spanish or Portuguese, where it was used to refer to sailing into
uncharted waters. The notion of risk is inseparable from the condition
of modernity, of excitement and adventure. A positive embrace of risk
is the very source of the energy that creates freedom and wealth in the
modern world. The main question is about risk acceptance and its con-
ditions. Risk acceptability depends on whether those who carry the
losses also receive the benefits. Where this is not the case, the risk will
be unacceptable to those affected. If even the benefit is in disputeas
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is the case with G.M. foodit is not enough to demonstrate that the
residual risk is, statistically speaking, highly improbable. A risk can-
not be considered in and of itself. It is always framed by the criteria
used in evaluating it and colored by the cultural assumptions that sur-
round it. Or to put it another way, risks are as big as they appear. This
is always true. But it is even more true in the case of manufactured
uncertainties.
It is against this background that technical experts perceive the popula-
tions that surround them as irrational or hysterical, either because they
seem to be making bad calculations of personal riskas when smokers
protest against nuclear energyor because they express themselves with
lurid imagesas when Great Britain, seemingly invaded by German
angst, demonized their genetically modified wonders as Frankenstein
food. Its a striking phrase, and it did serve as something of an ulti-
mate weapon in the war of words against G.M. food. But it contained
the important insight that even objective risks contain implicit judg-
ments about what is right. Technical experts have lost their monopoly
on rationality in the original sense: they no longer dictate the propor-
tions by which judgment is measured. Statements of risk are based on
cultural standards, technically expressed, about what is still and what is
no longer acceptable. When scientists say that an event has a low prob-
ability of occurring, and hence is a negligible risk, they are necessarily
encoding their judgment about relative payoffs. So it is wrong to regard
social and cultural judgments as things that can only distort the per-
ception of risk. Without social and cultural judgments, there are no
risks. Those judgments constitute risk, although often in hidden ways.
What kinds of burdens does this place on individuals, families, and
entire societies?
It is evident that individuals and families are overloaded with the bur-
den to decide about the reality of risks. There is definitely a need for
new institutions. Let me focus on the consequences for the economy
and entire societies. Virtual risks no longer need to exist in order to be
perceived as fact. You might criticize them as phantom risks, but this
does not matter economically. Perceived as risks, they cause enormous
losses and disasters. Thus the distinction between real risks and hys-
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terical perception no longer holds. Economically this makes no differ-
ence. The loss of science-oriented dispute settlement mechanisms and
the dominance of cultural perceptions have two main implications.
They increase and enforce the cross-national diversity of regulatory
standards. And this diversity can cause enormous tensions not only
domestically, but also in global, regional, and bilateral trading systems.
Even existing supranational democratic institutions have difficulties in
reaching decisions. For example in the E.U., which has probably made
the greatest progress in establishing transnational decision-making bod-
ies, member states still accepted or rejected the clearance certificates for
British beef according to their own lights. Thus the inability to manage
manufactured uncertainties both nationally and globally could become
one of the main counter-forces to neo-liberalism. It could end bitterly
disappointing those who have put their hopes in market solutions to
consumer safety problems. Recent consumer protection and product
liability legislation has shown a clear tendency towards anticipating
potential losses rather than being geared to losses actually sustained.
Furthermore, the burden of proof seems to be shifting from the con-
sumer to the producer in a number of fields.
How would you characterize the relationship between so-called glob-
alization and risk? In what sense is risk society a world risk society?
We touched this topic before. Many risks we are confronted with are
global by their very nature. Three dimensions of danger can be differ-
entiated in the global risk society, each following a different kind of
logic of conflict. These spin out or repress other themes, destroy or
enthrone priorities: first, ecological crises; second, global financial
crises; and thirdsince September 11, 2001terrorist dangers caused
by transnational terror networks. In all three of these dimensions of
danger, and beyond all differences, a common model of political
chances and contradictions can be seen in the global risk society.
How is world risk society stratified? Do some people/societies carry
more of the fall-out of risk than others? Do we all somehow live in
communities of fate infused with equal amounts of risk? What are
the possibilities for collective action? What are the implications for
national and international governance and for social justice?
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The term global risk society should not be confused with a homoge-
nization of the world, because all regions and cultures are not equally
affected by a uniform set of non-quantifiable, uncontrollable risks in
the areas of ecology, economy, and terrorist networks. On the contrary,
global risks are per se unequally distributed. They unfold in different
ways in every concrete context, mediated by different historical back-
grounds, cultural and political patterns. In the so-called periphery, glob-
al risks appear not as an endogenous process, which can be fought by
means of autonomous national decision-making, but rather as an
exogenous process that is propelled by decisions made in other coun-
tries, especially in the center. People feel like the helpless hostages of
these processes in so far as corrections are virtually impossible at the
national level.
Isnt this also true in the so-called center?
Yes, but there is a difference. One area in which the difference is espe-
cially marked is the experience of global financial crises, whereby entire
regions on the periphery can be plunged into depressions that citizens
of the center do not even register as crises. Moreover, ecological and
terrorist-network threats also flourish with particular virulence under
the weak states that define the periphery. There is a dialectical relation
between the unequal experience of being victimized by global risks and
the trans-border nature of the problems. It is exactly the transnational
aspect, which makes cooperation indispensable to their solution, that
truly gives them a cosmopolitan nature. The collapse of global financial
markets or climatic change affects regions quite differently. But that
doesnt change the principle that everyone is affected, and everyone can
potentially be affected in a much worse manner. Thus, in a way, these
problems endow each country with a common cosmopolitan interest,
which means the globalized public reflection of global risk conflicts
produces the basis of a community of fate.
But are people conscious of this community of fate? For instance,
do the Chinese people feel they are part of a community of fate with
the European people as far as global warming is concerned?
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They dont in relation to global warming or human rights, but at least
for the historical moment, they do in relation to the terrorist threat.
Even Le Monde used the headline: We are all Americans. The Chinese
government bridged the gulf and joined the U.S.-coalition against ter-
rorism. Furthermore, it is also intellectually obvious that global prob-
lems only have global solutions and demand global cooperation. But
between the potential of global cooperation and its realization lies a
host of risk conflicts. Examples for this are evident and endless: Think
of the quarrels about the beef risk, the B.S.E. crises inside Europe
and now arising in the U.S., the ongoing risk conflict on genetically
manipulated food, global warming, AIDS, the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction, and last but not least, how to define and fight
transnational terrorism. And yet these conflicts still serve an integrative
and enlightening function, because they make it increasingly clear that
global solutions must be found and that these cannot be found through
war, but only through negotiation and contract.
Do you mean the war in Iraqmeant to fight the global risk of ter-
rorismhas an integrative and enlightening function?
Yes, to some extent it is having such a function! What I really didnt
even hope for is happening now: The U.S. superpower is finally realiz-
ing that it cannot bowl alone. And we Europeans, too, are beginning
to learn that we can no longer concentrate on what we like to concen-
trate on most: Europe. If democracy in Iraq fails, it is going to hurt
Europe as well. In the interdependent world in which we live, there is
no outside, no option to isolate oneself. So people are realizing: The
terrorist threat is connecting people who dont want to be connected
and forcing them to talk and listen to each other. So we Europeans,
too, must ask and answer the questions: What is our vision of the 21
st
century world? What is our contribution to solve, for example, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In order to reduce the terrorist threat, dont
we have to open our borders and invest more in the development of
poor countries?
What are the opportunities, the possible goods of risk society?
While it seems that luck or good fortune have a place in risk soci-
ety, is there a place for hope?
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There is a place for hope. In an age in which belief in government,
nation, and class disappears, the known and recognized globality of
danger is transformed into a source of associations, opening up new
global political prospects for action. The terror attacks have brought
states closer together and have sharpened the understanding of what
globalization actually is: a worldwide community of destiny confronted
with violent, destructive obsession. How then is politics possible in the
age of globalization? My answer is: through the perceived globality of
danger, which renders the apparently recalcitrant system of internation-
al and national politics fluid and malleable. In this sense, fear cultivates
a quasi-revolutionary situation, which admittedly can be used in quite
different ways. Again and again, one asks and discusses: what can unify
the world? The experimental answer is an attack from Mars. This ter-
rorism is an attack from inner Mars. For a historical instant, the dis-
persed camps and nations of the world are unified against the common
enemy of global terrorism. It is precisely the universalization of the ter-
rorist threat against the states of the world that changes the war against
global terror into a challenge for Grand Politics, in which new alliances
are forged beyond antagonistic camps, regional conflicts are dammed
up, and the map of global politics is mixed up anew.
Isnt this a very ambivalent hope? Arent you arguing that manufac-
tured uncertainties are increasing? That there is no way back to the
promised land of certainty, security, and rationality?
What we need, I suggest, is a culture of uncertainty, which has to be
clearly distinguished from residual risk culture, on the one hand,
and a no-risk or safety culture, on the other. The key to a culture
of uncertainty lies in the readiness to openly talk about the approach
to risk; the willingness to acknowledge the difference between quanti-
tative risks and non-quantitative uncertainty; the willingness to nego-
tiate between different rationalities, rather than to engage in mutual
denunciation; the willingness to erect modern taboos on rational
grounds; and, last but not least, a recognition of the central impor-
tance of demonstrating the collective will to act responsibly and
accountably with regard to the losses that will always occur despite
every precaution. A culture of uncertainty will no longer carelessly
speak of residual risks because each speaker will recognize that risks
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are only residual if they happen to other people, and the point of a
democratic community is that we take responsibility jointly. But the
culture of uncertainty is also different from a safety culture. By that
I mean a culture in which absolute safety is considered an entitlement
that society should strive towards. Such a culture would smother all
innovation in its cradle.