Ulrich Beck > Quotes

“But where danger lurks, the saving powers also grow.”
― Ulrich Beck, German Europe

“Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world.”
― Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

“The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads.”
― Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

“What ‘relations of production’ in capitalist society represented for Karl Marx, ‘relations of definition’ represent for risk society. Both concern relations of domination (Beck 2002; Goldblatt 1996). Among the relations of definition are the rules, institutions and capabilities which specify how risks are to be identified in particular contexts (for example, within nation-states, but also in relations between them). They form at the legal, epistemological and cultural power matrix in which risk politics is organized (see chapters 9 and 10). Relations of definition power can accordingly be explored through four clusters of questions:”
― Ulrich Beck, World at Risk

“In all previously existing democracies, there have been two types of authority: one coming from the people and the other coming from the enemy. Enemy stereotypes empower. Enemy stereotypes have the highest conflict priority. They make it possible to cover up and force together all the other social antitheses. One could say that enemy stereotypes constitute an alternative energy source for consensus, a raw material becoming scarce with the development of modernity. They grant exemption from democracy by its own consent [143].”
― Ulrich Beck, Democracy without Enemies

“Change in society, social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.”
― Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

“When risk appeared on the stage, God had to renounce his role as lord of the universe”
― Ulrich Beck, World at Risk