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Printed at: 03/09/2010  –  07:30:41


World Risk Society

By: Ulrich Beck (Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich)


Description

This major new book draws together key essays by one of Europe's leading social and political theorists.

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Paperback
Status
Available
Edition
First Edition
ISBN
9780745622217
ISBN10
0745622216
Publication Dates ROW:
Oct 1999
Publication Dates US:
Publication Dates Aus & NZ:



Format
229 x 152 mm , 6 x 9 in
Pages
192 pages

* Exam copies only available to lecturers for whom the book may be suitable as a course text.
Please note: Sales representation and distribution for Polity titles is provided by John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

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Reviews

"Full of ideas and insights and thus extremely stimulating reading ... essential reading for those seeking to bridge the gap between theory about societies and theories about world politics - a bridge that is urgently needed."

-- Millennium: Journal of International Studies

"A critical and dispassionate account of ecological threats that are wealth-driven, poverty-driven, or are owed to nuclear, biological and chemical means of mass destruction; a powerful discourse on risk calculation and insurability that permeates the book in an almost metaphorical sense; and, as a bonus for the disappointed student of socialist political economy, a poignant if implicit refutation of liberal economics and rational choice theory as meaningful explanatory tools of reality."

-- Canadian Journal of Political Science

'This challenging collection of essays by one of the major social theorists of our time is essential reading for anyone interested to get to know the breadth of Ulrich Beck's work on the 'Risk Society'. Addressing academics and policy makers, Beck analyses the impact of the 'World Risk Society' on the environment and considers the implications of this globalization of 'organized irresponsibility' for socio-political and economic action. World Risk Society is social theory at its contemporary best: powerful, engaged and socially relevant.'

-- Barbara Adam, Cardiff University

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Cosmopolitan Manifesto.

2. World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society? Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties.

3. From Industrial Society to the Risk Society: Questions of Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment.

4. Risk Society and the Welfare State.

5. Subpolitics: Ecology and the Disintegration of Institutional Power.

6. Knowledge or Unawareness: Two Perspectives on 'Reflexive Modernization'.

7. Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics, Critiques and Research Programmes.

Notes.

References.

Index.

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Author Information

Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

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