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The Environmental Threat As Institutional Crisis
Ulrich Beck. Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the Risk Society. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995.
Ulrich Beck. Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1995.
The writings of the German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, represent a unique and important contribution to the environmental literature. In an age when most social scientists have specialized in ever narrower domains of social and political inquiry, Beck has attempted to grasp the social totality. He has tried nothing less than to come to grips with the environmental crisis and its implications for social and political change in western industrial societies generally. Beck, in this respect, has attempted to reconceptualize the whole of modern society as a "risk society." In what has proven in Europe to be a most insightful and provocative thesis, his work has constituted the basis of a wide-ranging environmental discussion. Reaching far beyond the walls of academia, it has been extensively debated in the public media as well. For this reason, Beck has emerged as a rare example of a modern-day public intellectual, one who tries not only to contribute to the social scientific understanding of the problem at hand but to influence of the course of public affairs as well.
The two books under review here are elaborations and extensions of Beck's major work, Die Risikogesellschaft (Beck, 1992), appearing in German in 1986 and in English in 1992. Both of these books carry forward the basic thesis of the risk society. Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk adds his concept of "organized irresponsibility" to the discussion and elaborates on the politics of environmental expertise and counterexpertise. Ecological Enlightenment was written to both clarify his arguments and to respond to his critics. The original German edition contains a dozen essays by distinguished social scientists, journalists, and politicians who assay the theory of the risk society. As these essays offer many critical insights into Beck's work, it is unfortunate that they were not carried forward in the English edition.
The concept of the risk society refers to an epoch in which the dark sides of progress increasingly come to dominate social and political debate. It brings forth that which few want to see and...