Risikogesellschaft

Risk Society on the Path to a Different Modernity

There is nothing to add to the sufficiently developed horror panorama of a self-endangering civilization that is present in all parts of the opinion market; nor to the expressions of a new perplexity, from which the organizing dichotomies of an industrial world that is still "whole" even in its contradictions have been lost. This book addresses the second, subsequent step. It makes this state itself the subject of explanation. Its question is how to understand and comprehend these insecurities of the zeitgeist, which are cynically denied in ideological critique, and which would be dangerous to yield to without distance, in a sociologically informed and inspired way of thinking. The theoretical guiding idea that is developed for this purpose can best be explained through a historical analogy: Just as in the 19th century modernization dissolved the rigidly structured agrarian society and revealed the structural image of industrial society, modernization today is dissolving the contours of industrial society, and in the continuity of modernity, a different social form is emerging.