Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the steps of Beck’s argument from industrial modernity to the risk society.
- Politics reorganises itself around the distribution of risk rather than of goods
- Industrial modernity organises itself around producing and distributing wealth
- Technical decision-making generates hazards that are side-effects of production
- Those hazards cannot be confined to the groups or places that created them
- Expert calculation of probabilities loses public authority as the hazards escape it
Hints
- The sequence begins with a society organised around goods, not hazards.
- The turn comes when the hazards stop respecting the boundaries that contain unequal wealth.
Show the answer
- Industrial modernity organises itself around producing and distributing wealth
- Technical decision-making generates hazards that are side-effects of production
- Those hazards cannot be confined to the groups or places that created them
- Expert calculation of probabilities loses public authority as the hazards escape it
- Politics reorganises itself around the distribution of risk rather than of goods
Why
The third step is the load-bearing one. Wealth can be concentrated and its absence contained; Beck’s claim is that manufactured risks — radiation, chemical residues, climate — cross the boundaries that make inequality manageable, which is why he thought they would reorganise politics rather than merely add to its agenda.
Practise Modernity and Postmodernity
The app has 7 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Modernity and Postmodernity
- Giddens describes the present as a radicalised modernity while Lyotard describes it as postmodernity. What is…
- Complete the account of the rival diagnoses of the present.
- Arrange these interventions in the modernity debate, earliest first.
- Fredric Jameson and David Harvey treat postmodern phenomena as a cultural style rather than an epochal break.…
- Sociologists now treat the classical secularisation thesis as having failed in an important respect, while…
- Estimate how many years separate Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne and Bauman’s Liquid Modernity.
- Which claims about Beck’s concept of manufactured risk are accurate?