Abstract
Despite his neglect of class inequalities, Beck’s theorization of risk society, of risks as distributional positions, and of the inadequacies of the contemporary politics of risk, provides rich avenues for researching contemporary inequalities. This brief review sketches some of the strengths and limitations of Beck’s theory of risk society for understanding social inequalities.
Beck argued in his classic Risk Society (1992) that risk society is a new type of modernity, in which the social production, definition, and distribution of risks are becoming a fundamental problem in social and political life. Ultimately, Beck argued that the technological power and undemocratic nature of science and industry led to the creation of risks that the protective and political structures that were holdovers from our previous form of modernity could no longer adequately address (Beck, 1992, 1999). Such developments, Beck argued, were rendering class inequalities increasingly irrelevant; the politics of risk were superseding the politics of class due to the increasingly catastrophic and universal distribution of risks. As he quipped, ‘poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic’ (Beck, 1992: 36; see also Mythen, 2005).
However, in his later work, Beck (2010) began to take social inequalities associated with climate change more seriously. Beck highlighted the importance of how climate change was increasing inequality and suggested that the growing transnationalization of risk processes was not only affecting contemporary inequality, but also required a fundamental rethinking of contemporary sociology’s methods (Beck, 2010). His work increasingly focused on the ‘cosmopolitan’ dimension of contemporary life, suggesting that ‘methodological nationalism’ was unable to adequately address the way in which the ‘side-effect principle’ was driving inequalities in new ways (Beck, 2007). While this acknowledgement of social inequalities related to climate change was an important shift in Beck’s work, he also limited its overall impact on the understanding of risk society in three key ways. Firstly, the cosmopolitan politics he advocated was premised on universal endangerment and hence implied powerful limits to how different people’s risk fates could be (see Curran, 2013b). Secondly, while suggesting that climate change increased inequalities, he declared at the same time that climate change ‘simultaneously dissolves them’ (Beck, 2010: 175). Lastly, Beck continued to interpret ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘logic of risk conflict’ as incompatible with the ‘logic of class’ (Beck, 2013).
This continued separation of social inequality from class inequalities weakened Beck’s theorization of contemporary inequalities. However, while differing from his conclusions, it is possible to build upon Beck’s risk society framework to show how processes associated with risk society, such as contemporary environmental and financial risks, are actually intensifying rather than simply reproducing class inequalities. With respect to environmental risks, class inequalities and their associated differentials in economic resources are allowing those with relatively greater resources to monopolize scarce ‘private escape routes’, leading others to bear the brunt of these risks (Curran, 2013a). In terms of financial risk, it has been shown how the power to occupy positions in finance that can produce vast levels of risk and appropriate the benefits from these risks, while avoiding the majority of their nefarious side-effects, is likewise further intensifying class inequalities and the advantages of the elite (Curran, 2015). These claims, showing certain powerful similarities in the logic of distribution of contemporary risks are, however, not merely critical of Beck. It is through Beck’s own conceptual analysis of socially produced risks and his insistence that the side-effects of the production of goods must no longer remain in the background that it has been possible to move forward to a new incipient political economy of risk and inequality. In this way, Beck’s work on risk society continues to be problematic, insightful, and hugely relevant to contemporary society and its inequalities.