A new feature of our world risk society is that risk is produced for political gain. This political use of risk means that fear creeps into modern life. A need for security encroaches on our liberty and our view of equality.
However, Beck is anything but an alarmist and believes that the anticipation of catastrophe can fundamentally change global politics. We have the opportunity today to reconfigure power in terms of what Beck calls a 'cosmopolitan material politics'.
World at Risk is a timely and far-reaching analysis of the structural dynamics of the modern world, the global nature of risk and the future of global politics by one of the most original and exciting social thinkers writing today.
* 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.
"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
Chapter 1.
Introduction: Staging Global Risk.
Chapter 2.
Relations of Definition as Relations of Domination: Who Decides What is and is not a Risk?.
Chapter 3.
The `Cosmopolitan Moment' of World Risk Society or: Enforced Enlightenment.
Chapter 4.
Clash of Risk Cultures or: The Overlapping of the State of Normalcy and the State of Exception.
Chapter 5.
Global Public Sphere and Global Subpolitics or: How Real Is Catastrophic Climate Change?.
Chapter 6.
The Provident State or: On the Antiquatedness of Linear Pessimism concerning Progress.
Chapter 7.
Knowledge or Non-Knowledge? Two Perspectives of `Reflexive Modernization'.
Chapter 8.
The Insurance Principle: Criticism and Counter-Criticism.
Chapter 9.
Felt War, Felt Peace: Staging Violence.
Chapter 10.
Global Inequality, Local Vulnerability: The Conflict Dynamics of Environmental Hazards must be studied within the Framework of Methodological Cosmopolitanism.
Chapter 11.
Critical Theory of World Risk Society.
Chapter 12.
Dialectics of Modernity: How the Crises of Modernity Follow from the Triumphs of Modernity.
Bibliography
