Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck's "Risk Society"
Rustin, Michael
There is good reason to fear that "postmodern" and "postindustrial" currents of thought will sweep away the foundations of existing radical critiques without offering anything very...
...The economic sphere is often referred to in Risk Society as a "technoeconomic system," in contrast to the politicoeconomic realm in which democratic decision making is the supposed norm...
...The shaping force in his account of change is the rationalizing mode of thought, which achieved its first partial transformation of the world through "industrial society...
...S. Lash and J. Urry, The End of Organised Capitalism (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987...
...Beck's central antithesis between "classical" and "reflexive" modernization is worked out in the domain of science as the contrast between wealth production and risk production...
...It is not abstract rationality that is the driving force, but the instrumental rationality of capital in particular...
...It has great merit as an account of the contradiction between the normative claims generated within industrial societies and the limits that its institutions impose on these claims...
...Work is being transformed by electronics...
...Beck sees this situation as unstable for two opposite reasons...
...We are witnessing not the end but the beginning of modernity— that is of a modernity beyond its classical industrial design...
...There seems to be something missing, however, in an argument that barely poses this question...
...Beck describes the dynamics and phenomenology of change in this world of late modernity with an exciting sweep and comprehensiveness...
...One can see this process of "modernization" being driven not by its own internal logic, but by capital...
...And of course, technology applied to warfare threatens total destruction...
...Where for many contemporary philosophers, "rationality" has become synonymous with a "discourse" devoid of absolute norms or foundations, Beck's concept of "reflexive modernity" implies the attainability of rational consensus once the conditions for democratic deliberation are created...
...Beck suggests that challenges to scientific authority mean that reason is becoming generalized and society more fully reflexive and responsible for its future...
...Incomplete Modernity soring corporate agencies, that is the major agent of change...
...A kind of democratic civil society—which is offered as the necessary response to a world of "risk...
...Does the dispersal of political life to Beck's preferred sites—legal contests, media debate, and citizens' networks—compensate for the collapse of the more concentrated "countervailing powers" of parties and labor unions, as defenders of the majority interest...
...Although these institutions were claimed to be instruments of social justice, they also unavoidably served as distributors of unequal advantage to middle-class consumers...
...Yet one can read Beck's analysis in a less optimistic spirit...
...Whether the issue be the state of the ozone layer, the population of whales, or toxins in food, there is now invariably more than one informed and articulate side to each debate...
...On the other side, the reflexive practices that are most relevant are also decentralized and specialized, usually taking place within social movements outside the sphere of political parties...
...Just as modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century, and produced the industrial society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being . . . the counter-modernistic scenario currently upsetting the world—new social movements and criticism of science, technology and progress—does not stand in contradiction of modernity, but is rather an expression of reflexive modernization...
...These include increasing life expectancy—the "demographic liberation of women...
...The fundamental right on which this system is based, hardly referred to by Beck, is the right to property...
...Marshall Berman's epigraph from The Communist Manifesto, "All that is solid melts into air," could be the epigraph to Beck's book as well...
...On the one hand, the most important decisions that affect human lives are made not by politicians, but in the dispersed scientific and corporate centers in which technological innovations are planned...
...The populist right was thus able to appeal successfully to the people over the heads of the elected or appointed defenders of their interests...
...The teleology of his account, the idea that modernity is a continuing, directional process driven by reason, places Beck in opposition to postmodern celebrants of fragmentation, discontinuity, and contingency...
...Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (Basic Books, 1984...
...The rules of constitutional democracy are limited to the (infrequent) choice of political representatives and to (minority) participation in forming political programs...
...In it the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm...
...Beck's book, published in Germany in 1986 and successful enough there to have sold more than sixty thousand copies and turned its author into a regular columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is characteristically West German in its formation...
...It is the development of new forms of production— whether of drugs, electronics, bio-engineering, or machinery—that shape humanity's future, and the state in relation to these is merely an ineffective, post-facto regulator...
...The gain in power from techno-economic progress is increasingly overshadowed by the production of risks...
...400 • DISSENT...
...Socialism," as a project of universal emancipation and equality, is thus being pushed out of its former institutional cradle...
...Ulrich Beck's remarkable book Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992), however, gives one cause to think again about whether a new model might not be available for understanding our times—and in a not unhopeful spirit...
...at containing the role of the automobile, not merely cleaning up its engines...
...Whether it is possible, in a postscarcity society, to bring this juggernaut of transformation under control, when the agencies that previously most resisted it are so weakened, is the great unanswered question for contemporary radicals...
...It is worth looking at each of these institutional spheres in turn...
...operated in a twofold manner, exploiting the unquestioned authority of experts in their dealings with the public, while basing this authority on the provisional and falsifiable nature of science in contrast to pre-modern forms of knowledge...
...It is all very well to criticize social democracy, the welfare state, trade unionism, and social classes as agents of change, but what other institutions does the left have to depend on once these have been thrown into crisis...
...In Beck's thesis, class solidarities derived from the survival within industrial societies of the status hierarchies of feudalism...
...Incomplete Modernity Because of this we need to move "from the solidarity of need to solidarity motivated by anxiety" —a potentially classless solidarity because all are equally threatened by the new kinds of risk...
...The right to criticism within professions and organizations, like the right to strike, ought to be fought for and protected in the public interest...
...Cumulatively, the litany of "risks" cited by Beck—global warming, chemical toxicity, the extinction of species, radiation, genetic engineering— becomes compelling, though Beck is less sensitive to the cultural and even quasireligious shaping of this "risk agenda" than he might be.* But more compelling than Beck's enumeration of actual risks is the application of his "incomplete modernity" idea to the whole sphere of scientific discourse...
...Does flexible and casual employment mean that material existence and work will be structurally separated from each other (via a basic income entitlement, for example) or merely that large minorities will once again be forced into economic uncertainty and intermittent poverty...
...at reducing demand for energy, not finding more ways of generating it...
...It is the commodification of everything that is transforming the world, desacralizing what was formerly sacred (the family, the natural world), breaking up those institutions (welfare states, trade unions, entrenched employment rights) that offered resistance to capital accumulation, instrumentalizing even knowledge itself...
...the equalization of educational opportunity...
...Doesn't the present erosion of "Fordist work patterns" lead mainly to the expulsion of a significant part of the population from any economic role...
...Beck conceives the remedy for this "melting" in terms of a reflexive rationality, dispersed in a variety of citizen communities with access to legal and cultural resources...
...Various changes are undermining women's dependent "feudal" status, which was linked in the premodern ideology of patriarchy to a wider system of social subordination...
...It is not merely the so-called "natural world" of forests, climate, species that is affected by technological interventions, but the social world too...
...the tendency to intentional motherhood, via the availability of family planning and abortion...
...We are therefore concerned no longer exclusively with making nature useful, or with releasing mankind from traditional constraints, but also and essentially with problems resulting from techno-economic development itself...
...In "reflexive modernity," which embeds Habermas's rather abstract idea of critical reason in the concrete social world, Beck evokes the possibility of a fully con scious, rational society, able to take responsi bility for its development and for its relation ship to nature...
...He provides a synoptic reading of a wide range of industrial institutions, seeing these as aspects of an essentially incomplete and arrested process of modernization...
...Scott Lash provided the introduction to Beck's English edition...
...Another interpretation can be offered of this process...
...His argument is that "while in classical industrial society the 'logic' of wealth production dominates the 'logic' of risk production, in the risk society this relationship is reversed...
...North America seems, once again, the vanguard of modernity, not an aberration from the European norm, as socialists used to see it...
...It does not follow from the fact that the earlier institutions of resistance— mass political parties, trade unions, churches, or even national governments—can no longer oppose these processes effectively that some better form of "resistance" in the form of dispersed critique within civil society is waiting to take their place...
...We could add that these "guarantors" are themselves incomplete and frail...
...These contests have also made evident that what underlies the arguments among scientists are ethical and social commitments, which set many research agendas in the first place...
...In the circumstances it is reasonable to hang on to what remains of these frameworks of critical thought on a principle of theoretical economy: don't abandon an established theory until one appears that offers superior explanations and strategies...
...His critique is directed to "technoscientific rationality," not the institutional power of capital, as if it is the mode of scientific thinking itself, rather than its spon * M.J...
...One can thereby see the crisis of several institutions of industrial society in a positive way, as their unequal and undemocratic forms become exposed to critique...
...The most fundamental argument here asserts "the end of the antithesis between nature and society...
...At an earlier stage of industrial society, science and technology sometimes did only limited damage, and piecemeal remedies could be sought when such damage occurred...
...Beck's argument is that both Marx's and Weber's accounts of the salience of class and status are far more relevant to industrial than they are to "reflexively modern" societies like ours...
...His book displays a real sociological imagination...
...The declining significance of party politics is in part a recognition of the irrelevance of centralized state structures to technically based changes that are both dispersed and global in their effects...
...The forms of mobilization that Beck proposes are undoubtedly good things, but whether they are a match for the capitalist penetration of the world is another matter entirely...
...and new citizens' initiatives and social movements, such as those that have been developed in response to ecological dangers...
...Piore and C.F...
...Yet, he points out, scientific institutions have normally * See Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildaysky's Risk and Culture (University of California Press, 1982), for a more skeptical treatment of ecological concerns...
...Most of the institutional changes that Beck describes—in the family, work, and politics— are the effects of the pervasive intervention of markets into hitherto unpenetrated or resistant spheres...
...Modernization is becoming reflexive...
...Although he defends a vision of "modernity" against the fragmentation and incoherence of the "post-modern," it is not clear that he can offer a tenable view of modern social organization at all...
...Beck's argument has affinities with the theses of "Post-Fordism" and of "Disorganized Capitalism...
...His argument, which is addressed primarily to a new radical public of the left, reinterprets what others see as the development of a "postmodern" order as instead the next stage of modernity...
...In the light of this thesis, one might say that the process of normative emancipation involved in "modernity" —the idea that rights and opportunities should be available to all individuals, regardless of birth or class position— undermines the solidarities of class on which the idea of equality has depended as its collective bearer...
...Ultimately, the monopolization of democratically constituted decision-making rights is founded on the contradictory image of a democratic monarchy...
...Whereas the control of nature was seen in the Enlightenment as a means of human liberation, Beck argues that this control has become a source of potential catastrophe...
...The guarantors of a genuinely democratic process are legal rights upholding freedom of expression, mass communications providing access to the public sphere, and educational resources that give citizens some cognitive resource for acting upon their situation...
...This in fact seems to be more a post-Marxist than a Marxist definition of the situation...
...The claims of rational critique asserted in classical modernist mode against premodern beliefs is now being made in a spirit of reflexive modernity against science itself...
...Following Habermas and a long German tradition, Beck is at root an idealist in his approach...
...The crucial institutions are the judiciary, with its potential for protecting citizens and their right to know...
...An alternative interpretation is that "knowledge" becomes wholly relative to the interests it serves, not a source of insight so much as a weapon in social conflicts...
...How convincing is Beck's theory of "reflexive modernity...
...To put it in Marxist terms," he says, "we increasingly confront the phenomenon of a capitalism without classes, but with individualized social inequality and all the related social and political problems...
...These changes express the liberation of women from the dictates of their modern female status fate...
...If the nation-state has become too weak to contain globalized capital, it may be that we need cooperation between states or supranational states, and that nothing else will do...
...the mass media, with the power of 398 • DISSENT publicity...
...Beck argues that these now amount to "non-classspecific global hazards," the product of a situation where the whole of nature, and the spheres of both production and reproduction, are constituted through science-based interventions...
...On this alternative view, which would look to update Marx rather than Hegel, we have a capitalism without classes, ecological catastrophe in place of immiseration...
...Beck defends "modernity" as a still incomplete form of emancipation...
...Faced with "scientific evidence" for or against some project or process, citizens now routinely locate their own sources of qualified advice...
...There is good reason to fear that "postmodern" and "postindustrial" currents of thought will sweep away the foundations of existing radical critiques without offering anything very substantial in their place...
...Beck describes an epochal shift, now in mid-course, from "industrial society" to what he calls "risk society...
...Risk society is a catastrophic society...
...Not only status inequality, but even the utopian responses to it—the socialist idea of equality itself—were products of the pre-bourgeois social order...
...A key case is the position of women in industrial society, which Beck describes as a kind of ascribed feudal dependency, organized by the sacralized institution of the family, dedicated to unequal gender relations...
...The "problems" that are now the subject of scientific and political controversy (for example, the implications of nuclear power generation or tropical deforestation) are themselves the outcome of earlier science-based programs of economic and technical development...
...Certainly, there is evidence that class identifications and class-based voter alignments are diminishing everywhere in the West...
...Not, that is, the capture or reallocation of material and coercive power...
...Although they assign some rights of democratic participation and deliberation to citizens, they do so in radically unequal ways...
...The persuasiveness of this argument is theoretical as much as empirical...
...Beck appears to see "modernization" as a process driven by its own immanent logic...
...But there is a silence in his work about the continuing sources of this authority— about the power of capital that seems in fact to be the main obstacle to the diffused spirit of reflectiveness and self-making that Beck imagines as a possible future...
...Beck thinks we should be looking holistically at causes, not symptoms: for example, at the environmental causes of diseases, and not drugs to control them...
...What is now happening, argues Beck, is that this bluff is being called...
...In this sense the Thatcherite revolution in Britain, and perhaps the parallel right-wing ascendancy in the United States, was an authentically "modernizing" movement, appropriating in populist and individualist terms universal claims that had in their more collectivized version belonged to the political left...
...Once "subordinate class subjects" cease to feel subordinate or inferior in their sense of self-worth—once they have achieved a certain level of emancipation—class and status memberships are felt to be demeaning, part of the problem of inequality and injustice rather than a collective resource for solving it...
...Even "globalization" is driven not merely by technology in the abstract, but by the deployment of technology by corporations for their own purposes...
...Although Beck links some institutions in causal terms—arguing for example that the subordination of women in the family is a function of male domination of the work sphere—it is the idea of an incompletely realized rationality, manifest in various institutional settings, that holds his historical model together...
...He imagines democratic, participative communities taking conscious responsibility for their relations with nature and for the social world...
...Whereas in the earlier postwar period, claims of social justice were mostly asserted in collectivist terms, during the 1980s it has proved politically effective to invoke the idea of individual rights against existing forms of social provision—for example the welfare state, trade unions—which had earlier seemed their main guarantors...
...Beck suggests that there needs to be a "medical parliament," to debate the ethics of new medical technologies...
...the frequency of divorce and separation, freeing women from lifelong support by husbands and often threatening them with poverty as a result...
...Beck consistently avoids making the conventional socialist attributions of power to the forces of capital, seeing these as powerful only in their capacity to mobilize technical change...
...Beck's idea (he says that the reader might see between the lines the sparkling lake beside which he wrote his book) is that modernity is still essentially incomplete...
...Class memberships and identities reworked preexisting senses of SUMMER • 1994 • 395 Incomplete Modernity social difference and subordination, sometimes giving them a different direction (relations of opposition rather than submission), but nevertheless building on what was perceived as the naturalness of status divisions to construct the class cultures of industrial society...
...To respond to these problems, a more dispersed and differentiated kind of politics is called for, not the futile attempt to orchestrate interests into a centralized party system...
...In Beck's view, not the redistribution of material resources (he assumes that the welfare state has become somewhat obsolete through its success in guaranteeing standards of life) but safeguards against "risk" have become the central issues...
...New flexibility in the work process and the differentiation and globalization of consumption patterns are dissolving the cultural solidarities of class systems, especially in West Germany and in Scandinavia...
...Yet he still refers to the desirability and feasibility of a "socialism of everyday life...
...While ostensibly devoted to ideals of public service, they also advanced the interests of their professional functionaries...
...He offers a remarkable synthesis of changes taking place in many spheres—work, science, politics, class, and family...
...a private sphere allowing space for a "personal politics...
...He combines a philosophical commitment to reflexive understanding with a grasp of societal dynamics of the lived world...
...Beck makes an exception that may no longer be correct for the United Kingdom: class solidarities now seem to have eroded there too...
...A third sphere in Beck's thesis of "incomplete modernization" is that of scientific and technological transformation...
...Elective government makes only a small concession, he points out, to the idea of full democratic responsibility...
...Once in office, it is not only the "monarch for a term" who develops SUMMER • 1994 • 397 Incomplete Modernity dictatorial leadership qualities and enforces his decisions in authoritarian fashion from the top down: the agencies, interest groups, and citizens' groups affected by the decisions also forget their rights and become "democratic subjects" who accept without question the state's claims to dominance...
...Now, the cumulative effects of scientific interventions provide the agenda for scientific industries...
...He argues in an interesting practical conclusion for the importance of information disclosure and self-criticism...
...Just as the family is viewed in this perspective of "reflexive modernity" as a "feudal" survival, so the institutions of the welfare compromise (and those of state socialism in the 396 • DISSENT East) have been revealed by their recent crises to be deeply compromised by inegalitarian, bureaucratic, and indeed authoritarian attributes...
...But more original than his somewhat rhetorical discussion of these risks is his re-reading of the process of modernization and 394 • DISSENT Incomplete Modernity of "modernity" itself...
...Most original is his distinction between "the industrial" and the "modern," and his demonstration of how authoritarian our institutions remain...
...by the antiproductionist concerns of the Greens, who have acquired in West Germany a unique degree of representation and influence...
...it is becoming its own theme...
...The "risks" of Beck's title are in the first instance ecological, the unforeseeable and barely controllable consequences for human life of the scientific and technological revolutions...
...A second dimension of this analysis is the declining significance of class and status...
...Society is seen as evolving toward a variety of networks, linked laterally as well as vertically, rather than as hierarchical chains of command...
...It is his separation of the industrial from the modern, and his positing of a further stage of "reflexive rationality" within each of these social spheres, that makes this book the pathbreaking synthesis that it is...
...He points out that science's legitimation claims depend on the fallibility of its findings: on rational argument and empirical evidence...
...Ulrich Beck formulates this problem in a new and challenging way...
...It is through the self-determining institutions of civil society, rather than through Hegel's rational state, that the potential of reason is to be realized in Beck's account...
...Beck presents this as a theory of "post-industrial modernity...
...and the increased entry of women into the labor market, linked to all the above processes...
...Whereas most postmodern theorists are critical of grand narrative, general theory, and human emancipation, Beck remains committed to all of these...
...How could electronic transfers of money and capital be captured by any existing political agency...
...Reflexive modernization" brings this entire system and its legitimating ideologies into the sphere of critical debate...
...But he does not offer a convincing solution to it...
...This, however, is only a partial step toward a world shaped by human reason...
...Beck's view of industrial society as a merely partial modernization is a powerful one...
...Beck is, however, reluctant to acknowledge that some institutions and sources of power in this contemporary system are more influential than others...
...Men and women are positioned by modern economic systems as individuals, not as class subjects...
...restructured and intensively capitalized housework...
...The productive forces have lost their innocence...
...This process, Beck suggests, is now so far advanced that science can no longer advance its authority claims in particular spheres without these claims being challenged...
...A process of reflexive delibera tion has to be dispersed throughout civil society if catastrophe is to be avoided...
...One reason for this is that risks cannot be detected, let alone methods found to avoid them, without technical expertise...
...These institutional sectors each manifest similar attributes of partially realized rationality...
...It is "shareholder democracy" —one share, one vote, not citizen democracy, "one person, one SUMMER • 1994 • 399 Incomplete Modernity vote" —that rules our world, and reason and science are deployed mainly as its instruments...
...It is informed theoretically by Habermas and his critical account of modernity, which Beck turns to his own original purpose...
...It was the truncating and dispersal of this feudal history that made American society so different and apparently "abnormal...
...Beck envisages a dispersed and ubiquitous form of participation, pressing "modernity" to the point where all claims can be questioned and choices based on rational deliberation take the place of habitual conformity...
...Finally, Beck brings the political sphere within the scope of his "incomplete modernity" thesis...
...and by a well-grounded sociology of German society that is highly sensitive to contradiction and disequilibrium...
...His argument lies, via its assimilation by the Frankfurt School and Habermas, in the tradition of Hegel, though he formulates his argument in sociological rather than philosophical terms...
...Beck might argue that these capitalist forms of power have now been irretrievably dispersed and placed beyond central control...
...The family is threatened by the potential of in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering...
...If we want to retain some conception of a possible socialism, it would have to be, in the light of Beck's argument, a "socialism without class...
...Beck develops this argument by demonstrating the numerous features of the premodern world that have continued as essential structures of industrial society, but that are now progressively called into question...
...There is now no "nature" that is not deeply affected by scientific intervention, and no "society" that is not transformed by the outcomes of science's conquest of nature...
...This is given particular emphasis by his risk-informed perspective...
...Will individuals released from the unquestioned roles and obligations of families, and freed to negotiate their own fundamental relationships, escape loneliness and expendability...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
