Abstract
Ulrich Beck was both a committed intellectual and one of the most original and innovative thinkers in our times, bringing new ideas and knowledge about the world in which we live. Among his more recent conceptual tributes, one finds such concepts as cosmopolitization of the world, the idea that social science has a lot to say about love in the second modernity, the importance of the city in a globalized world, and the notion of ‘emancipatory catastrophism’.
Rare are the thinkers who make a lasting impression on their era and rarer still those who at the same time act as forerunners of the times to come: Ulrich Beck succeeded in so doing better than any other sociologist, helping us to understand and know both the present and the future which is taking shape.
Ulrich Beck made an accurate socio-historical diagnosis of the world in which we live at an early date. His intellectual career led him, in several stages, to specify the nature of the period in which we live. In the 1980s he and his friend Anthony Giddens referred to it as this ‘second modernity’ which, as we shall see, appears to be a period of ‘metamorphosis’. He was beginning to clarify the concept in his last speaking engagements, for example on 8 December 2014 in my seminar at the EHESS to which I had invited him.
In a historical context in which there was as yet no mention of ‘globalization’ he was the first at a very early date to give the theme of risk its full impetus, with his well-known description of the Risikogesellschaf (Beck, 1986; see also Beck, 1999); he later focused on ‘global climate change’. Indeed, he was one of the first researchers to ‘think globally’.
He was thus in a position to construct the overall scientific framework imposed by the ‘second modernity’ and to propose that we challenge ‘methodological nationalism’, pleading on the contrary in favour of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. The image of the humanities and social sciences may well be open to criticism, confined as they were throughout their classical phase within ‘methodological nationalism’. However, it should be borne in mind that many leading sociologists or social anthropologists were open to the world; we only have to mention Max Weber or Emile Durkheim’s interest in religions. But it is impossible not to recognize that this truly brilliant term, ‘methodological nationalism’, which he popularized, does express the provincialism or ethnocentrism which too frequently characterizes research.
However, is there not perhaps an intermediary space between the world and the nations? Ulrich Beck was also a committed intellectual, a convinced supporter of the idea of Europe and, while his influence was felt at world level, I can testify that primarily his intellectual life was increasingly lived in an academic triangle. The apices were Munich, where he held a post of professor; London, and in particular the London School of Economics; and Paris, especially the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, where I had entrusted him with the responsibility of a chair in the newly formed Collège d’Etudes Mondiales.
As I can testify, Ulrich Beck enjoyed long face-to-face discussions during which each participant exposed their arguments and ideas, listened to those of their counterparts, objected, accepted, resisted, clarified their own thinking and asked the other person to respond to their objections, possibly changing their ideas in the course of the conversation. He, whose analyses so well epitomized the latest forms of modernity, was also in many ways the most classical figure of the committed intellectual. While he often appeared in the media, either in his own country or in the foreign press, he was in no way a victim of the ‘here and now’. Nor did he live at the rhythm of current events but was capable of commenting on certain ongoing events, for example catastrophes.
He died suddenly, and I believe the best tribute we can pay to him is to continue thinking along the lines of the major themes which he had opened up. I will list five of these.
1. The Cosmopolitization of the World
The first theme refers to ‘cosmopolitization’, a word which I consider to be crucial. He agreed that this term, which he introduced, was rather heavy and not very attractive. It was based on an approach to the world of our times and was not a plea in favour of some sort of cosmopolitism, along the lines of that of Immanuel Kant for example. Ulrich Beck was well aware of the negative connotations of this term and, in particular, that the anti-Semitism of the inter-war years was often presented as a denunciation of the ‘cosmopolitans’, those people who were described as having no roots, no attachment to the country in which they lived, indifferent to the fate of their host nation – in other words, the Jews. He was also fully aware of the fact that cosmopolitism can become an ideology, or a utopia, a discourse masking the unkept promise of equality and harmony between citizens. The American social anthropologist Elijah Anderson (2011) has, for example, well described the ‘Negro moment’ which can occur even under the ‘cosmopolitan canopy’, this enchanted urban space where everyone values everyone else – until the occurrence of a racist remark or de facto attitude excludes the black Americans from this world.
His idea, which we have discussed at length, is that contemporary realities force people to think of themselves as being located in spaces which are necessarily global, or in any event which extend well beyond the nation-state. Terrorism, which is now global, climate change, nuclear risk, migratory phenomena, for example, are only comprehensible if the analytical framework becomes global for every individual. It could, moreover, be shown that a global turning point did indeed occur around the beginning of the 1980s which resulted in various forms of evil assuming completely new configurations. Terrorism was no longer primarily a national phenomenon fomented either by the extreme left, the extreme right or regionalist forces but, with the emergence of radical Islamism, was becoming truly global. In these same years, anti-Semitism was re-thought in depth, as I have shown in a short text (Wieviorka, 2014) which I was working on when I discussed this issue with Ulrich Beck during my brief stay in Munich (February 2014); he was always very sensitive to this question. National-populist movements began to emerge, in particular in Europe; still in the 1980s and at the same time, racism became increasingly cultural and differentialist, as well as being institutional, etc. In all these instances, and in many others, to approach this type of phenomenon, we now have to consider rationales which extend well beyond the framework of the nation-state alone and its extension, known as international relations. To put it briefly, we know that our lives, including in their most local aspects, force us to think at world level, and ‘cosmopolitization’ was the term which Ulrich Beck coined for the processes which are at stake here.
2. Love
A second key word in Ulrich Beck’s work, and which at first surprised me, is love. But after reading the two books which he devoted to this question with his wife, I quickly grasped what he meant.
Classical sociology, which corresponds to the ‘first modernity’ period, and which is a heritage of the Enlightenment to a large extent, separates reason, the mind, consciousness, from feelings, emotions or passions, which in general are considered to be remote from its analyses. Love is rarely considered to be an appropriate subject for sociological analysis, and in the terminal phase of the classical era of the social sciences, in the years 1960 to 1980, the lack of interest in a subject such as love was confirmed by uniquely addressing structures, instances, systems, somewhat abstract mechanisms of domination. The structuralism prevailing at the time undoubtedly constituted a barrier to love, something highly subjective, being validated by the humanities and social sciences as a relevant object for study.
But these times are now past and, like Ulrich Beck, with whom I also discussed this question, I am convinced that the humanities and social sciences should open up simultaneously to individual, personal, subjectivity and to the entry into the era of cosmopolitization. I even think that we researchers should learn to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable to bridge the gap, and to continually navigate in intellectual spaces where the issue is one of both ‘thinking globally’ and examining processes of individual and collective subjectivation and de-subjectivation (see Wieviorka, 2015). From there on, love finds its rightful place in our disciplines, since it can bring into play simultaneously the most intimate, personal and subjective aspects of social experience and global rationales, if only to live ‘love at a distance’, in the words of Ulrich Beck and his wife Elisabeth (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, 2011).
3. The City
A third word which surprised me in our recent conversations was the word ‘city’. Ulrich Beck, the thinker of cosmopolitanization and a committed European, also questioned whether or not the future could not perhaps be conceived on the basis of large cities and their capacity to confront the major challenges of globalization. Are they not particularly well located to act efficiently on what is still a reasonable scale, with flexibility, by implementing a political life which is not subject to the present difficulties of the system of democratic representation operating at the national level? To some extent he was initiating a dialogue with Saskia Sassen, who was the first to deal with the ‘global city’ (Sassen, 2001). He may also have found inspiration amongst the historians, like Fernand Braudel, who focused on world-cities which have the capacity to be at the centre of far-reaching networks and exchanges and of controlling what Immanuel Wallerstein has referred to as the ‘world-economy’.
4. Emancipatory catastrophism
Another idea dear to Ulrich Beck, never one to be concerned with paradoxes, was whether or not a catastrophe could play a positive, constructive and even emancipatory role. Following this line of thinking did not mean adopting by inverting it the reactionary approach so well described by Albert Hirschman (1983) and approaches which stress that collective action leads to unexpected and necessarily damaging effects, nor to what Raymond Boudon (1977) calls ‘adverse’ effects. Nor did Beck intend to promote a form of ‘crisology’, to use Edgar Morin’s (1976) vocabulary; Morin considered that crisis is an opportunity to reveal something new which may also be positive and salutary. Ulrich Beck, on the other hand, wished to stress that all catastrophes force us to think, to invent new paths, find perspectives for new rights and new rationales of emancipation. He did not think that human action leads to possible catastrophes which might have beneficial effects, nor did he request that we rejoice at such possible effects. Ulrich Beck considered catastrophes as primarily an opportunity to force us to improve our thinking and project ourselves into the future (cf. Beck, 2015).
5. Metamorphosis
Finally, Ulrich Beck was keenly aware of living in a period of intense change. Obviously he did not reduce these changes to a crisis, even of major dimensions, and he said he had found the word which could best conceptually render this transition from one era to another: from this point on he spoke of ‘metamorphosis’. With this term, he could suggest a change, a historical transition, which would lead to new research fields in Europe, but also elsewhere, in particular in Asia, where his thinking has exerted and still exerts considerable influence. I had the opportunity of witnessing this during the International Sociological Association Congress in Yokohama (July 2014), where his presence represented a highly significant moment.
We are entering a new era, which forces us to renew our research tools, to redefine our subjects, to move, as I have said, from the most private and personal to the most general and global.
Ulrich Beck was a pioneer who advanced vigorously and rigorously. He paved the way for the humanities and social sciences in this new era and was setting up the continuation: specific programmes which would enable, through research, to advance along these paths, in his networks, in the working groups which he led and through his inexhaustible capacity for, and enjoyment of, discussion.
His death is a great loss.
Footnotes