New Social Inequalities on the World Scale

Risk industries are set up in countries where wages are cheap. "A systematic attractive force exists between extreme poverty and extreme risks." International inequalities arise between lands that "throw out their filth and those which take on the filth of others". The latter pay with the death of plants, animals and humans.

There is a unification from "levelling pressure" which occurs along with the global threat of modernisation risks. Beck argues for an increased urgency towards "the utopia" of a world society. In the transition to a risk society, people must adapt to threat of apocalypse -in the same way as the adaptation against economic decline was forced through the inception of the industrial society.

"Risk" jumps in to the jungle of corporate society, and complex political and administrative webs. Factors such as established interest groups and national egotism are important modulators of the response to risk. So too is the vague general sense of being affected by immense, tangible dangers. "Responsibility lies with everyone and no-one". Meanwhile, the usual day to

Solidarity out of fear

The industrial societies predication is on the "counterideal of equality". The risk society’s predication is on the "normative counterplan" of safety. The transition between the two replaces the value system of the unequal society with the value system of the unsafe society. The motive force of society moves from "I am hungry" to "I am scared".

Currently it is not obvious how the society bound by fear can operate: "how can the new solidarity of the frightened work?".

Thesis Three: "On the market form of modernisation risks".

Modernisation risks are big business. Thus the spread and marketing of risks does not break completely with capitalist development but rather elevates it. This is because there is a limit to conventional needs, but no limit to the amount of protection needed against endless, infinite and self-generating modern risks. With risks the economy becomes "self-referential", independent of the context of need satisfaction. In generating and exploiting risks the industrial society generates danger situations and the "particular political potential of the risk society".

Risks constitute a whole economic regeneration, not a spanner in the works of the system. The industrial system profits significantly from the (deplorable) risk it creates.

Risk needs are not finite and satiable: they are boundless. Saturated markets are transformed into new, open and expanding markets.

New branches of knowledge are generated: "critiques of civilisation, technology, ecology, the risk performances of the media, and risk research".

Beck’s "daring comparison" is to say that developed capitalism has "absorbed, generalised and normalised the destructive power of war". Like wars, conscious civilisation risks can destroy areas of overproduction & hitherto valid areas of production - eg highly polluting cars. This can be seen as really overcoming crises of turnover and creation of new markets.

The most important thing for the is that risk control must be above all symbolic: it must not remove the risk, it must be dealt with cosmetically. Inclusion of purification filters, packaging, symptomatic reduction of noxious substances.

This is the legacy of the power centres of the industrial society, who strive to maintain political and economic control.

[does this all add up to "we still haven’t learned yet"?]

Thesis Four "consciousness determines being, knowledge of risks and levels of effect of risks"

"Being determines consciousness in class and strata situations, whereas in situations of danger consciousness determines being".

Knowledge has a new political significance. "The political potential of the risk society must be explained and analysed in a sociological theory of the origin and distribution of risks and their significance".

Modernity, in coming to terms with the risks of civilisation, is under pressure to "de-differentiate". Eg the apparent institutionally separate areas of politics, the public sphere, knowledge and economy.

Risks cut across their areas of responsibility. Risk also cuts across established theoretical categories, such as theory and practice, fact value distinctions, across disciplines and specialised competency areas.

People often draw a mistaken line between scientific / technological evaluation of risks and popular opinion of them (+mass media portrayals), giving more credence to the former. But scientific risk research always "limps behind" social, environmental, cultural and developmental criticism of the industrial system. To Beck the conversion of scientist to the Risk bandwagon is often unnoticed and is representative of the control that they try to maintain in this new domain.

The claim of the technical sciences to rationality in the perception of risks amounts to the same as the claim of a pope, who has converted to protestantism, to infallibility (p97)