Sociology I / Modernity and Postmodernity
Practice question · Put in order

Arrange the steps of Beck’s argument from industrial modernity to the risk society.

Hints
  1. The sequence begins with a society organised around goods, not hazards.
  2. The turn comes when the hazards stop respecting the boundaries that contain unequal wealth.
Show the answer
  1. Industrial modernity organises itself around producing and distributing wealth
  2. Technical decision-making generates hazards that are side-effects of production
  3. Those hazards cannot be confined to the groups or places that created them
  4. Expert calculation of probabilities loses public authority as the hazards escape it
  5. 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.

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