Conversations with Ulrich Beck

Ulrich Beck, Johannes Willms, Michael Pollack

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745628240, 9780745628233
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this new book, Ulrich Beck and the journalist Johannes Willms engage in a series of accessible conversations that reveal and explore the key elements in Beck's thought.

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• Ulrich Beck, one of the most important and influential contemporary social thinkers, reveals and expands his work in a series of conversations with journalist Johannes Willms.
  
• These conversations shed new light onto the major themes in Beck's work and provide an insight into some of the commitments and beliefs that they rest upon.
  
• Includes new thinking on the risk society and on globalisation, themes that have put him at the forefront of contemporary debates.
  
• Witten in a clear and lucid way and thus ideal for anyone seeking to come to grips with Beck's work.

Conversation 1
Postmodernity or the Second Modernity?

johannes willms Let's begin with what sociology means, and why it's useful. What is the task of sociology?

ulrich beck The simplest answer is that sociology is the study of society. But that just regresses the question, because what is society? You can't see it, you can't smell it, you can't taste it, and you can't hold it in your hands.

What do you mean? Are you saying that society isn't sensuous? If I walk down a crowded sidewalk, or into a bar or football stadium, society seems to fill my senses, sometimes almost to the point of overwhelming me.

Yes, but that's not what sociology means by society. Society is certainly there where you sense it, but it goes beyond your senses. It is present where you find a lot of bodies, but it can't be reduced to them. It's something that manifests itself through them. The individual who reads a book quietly all alone in her room is still doing it within the force field of society. It is there in her origins and her education. It could be that she's writing a review. But whether she's making a living or fulfilling a duty or experiencing a pleasure, society is enabling and constraining her. Society is realizing itself through her actions.

Society's ethereality is only the first in a series of problems. We have then to deal with the fact that society is always disguising itself. It is covered over with a thick shell of its own interpretations. Society is composed of conscious agents, be they parties or unions, or less formally defined groups like the rich or the educated, and every one of them is constantly producing its own interpretations in order to explain and defend its position. This is the decisive difference between the social and the natural sciences. You can't just stick society in a test tube and analyze it scientifically. Unfortunately, these interpretations are not just nonsense that can be dismissed and swept away. They are important. They contain essential and indispensable knowledge that can only be gained by studying them in detail and analyzing out their truths.

What sociology does is to develop its idea of society out of these partial views and in contrast to them. For this reason, the sociological understanding of society necessarily entails at least a partial withdrawal from immediate perception. Society in the sociological sense is only graspable by means of a conceptual framework, one which has to seem abstract by comparison with the partial views that frame our everyday experience.

Then there is the question of power. By means of this process of abstraction and development, sociology necessarily under-cuts the self-interpretations of society's actors. This necessarily brings it into collision with the lay sociologists who represent them. Some of these views have a great deal of power behind them. Others have less power but have the authority of expertise because they are propounded by social critics or cultural theorists.

What we get in the end is such a tangle that sociology often seems cursed. But this is also its attraction for an ambitious thinker: the challenge of making sense of it all, and beyond it of society.

Let's take up the question of power for a moment. What would you say to the view, to put it a bit polemically, that sociology is just the handmaiden of power? That it supplies the information that political decision makers need to do their job?

Many sociologists would deny that. But the fact is, there is a deep connection between the ideas of sociology and the reality of the nation-state that manifests itself even in denial.

To start with, it's worth pointing out that sociology doesn't usually analyze society. It analyzes societies. We talk, every day, without giving it a second thought, about German society, French society, American society, Iranian society, Japanese society, etc. But what this way of speaking implies is that there are as many societies as there are nation-states. In the common sense of sociology, societies are assumed to be organized in nation-state terms. The state is assumed to be the regulator and guarantor of society. The nation-state is conceived of as something that contains society within its borders. The state is conceived of as something that fixes society, that secures and stabilizes it.

This idea that fully realized societies are nation-state societies is sociology's fundamental postulate, and it has molded every one of its central concepts. This is what I mean when I say that sociology is dominated by methodological nationalism. Its key assumption is that humankind is split up into a large but finite number of nations, each of which supposedly develops its own unified culture, secure behind the dike of its state-container.

How does this affect sociological practice?

It structures our entire way of seeing. Methodological nationalism is the unquestioned framework which determines the limits of relevance. The social space that is bordered and administered by the nation-state is assumed to contain all the essential elements and dynamics necessary for a characterization of society. The nation-state has become the background against which society is perceived. And when the sociological gaze is attuned like this, it has enormous difficulty in perceiving society when it appears outside this framework. The result is that non-nation-state forms of society are overlooked, minimized, or distorted. They are literally difficult for sociologists to conceive of.

Historically speaking, what sociologists have done in practice is that they've analyzed one nation, the one they've lived in, and then drawn inferences about society in general. In the best of cases they dallied a bit in a middle stage where they compared their chosen society with a couple of others before leaping to universal conclusions. This is true of Marx, who built his picture of capitalism out of the experience of nineteenth-century Britain. It holds for Durkheim, who was thinking of France when he asked his question “What holds modern societies together?” (He famously answered of course by arguing that the new division of labor that divides society also produces a new kind of organic solidarity to hold it together.) And it's true of Weber. When Weber was constructing his theory of bureaucracy and instrumental rationality, the main picture before his eyes was turn-of-the-century Prussian administration. To make a mea culpa, it was originally also true of me. My first book, Risk Society, articulated a vision of how global risk consciousness would soon affect society. But society was assumed to be a welfare state much like Germany of the 1970s and 1980s.

But isn't this methodology a little questionable? To distill concepts out of the experience of your own society, and then make those the standards against which to measure all societies of the same period, no matter how different their historical formations?

It's extraordinarily questionable. And, as many people have pointed out, it also represents a kind of western conceptual imperialism.

Yet none of that should blind us to the paradoxical fact that this approach was extremely fruitful for a long time. No matter what school of social thought you subscribe to today, sociology had a major role in shaping it. And every sociological concept, whether developed by Marx or Durkheim or Comte or Simmel or Weber, grew out of this generalization of the European experience of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its genius and its limitations are inseparable.

This is also the mixture that allowed western thought to misrepresent imperialism as the process of “western rationalization.” Sociology was contemporaneous with, and was one of the expressions of, the formative upsurge of European national consciousness. Within that framework of thought, colonial exploitation was firmly identified with progress. As an explicit assertion, this idea has now long been abandoned. But it still survives tenaciously in our assumptions. You can see it in the conceptual blindness that ascribes all improvement in developing countries to westernization, and ascribes all deterioration in their situation to not westernizing or not modernizing enough.

These conceptual blinders impose serious limitations on our ability to produce valid theories about the present world situation. They are also a political barrier, since, as a narrative of the history of the relations between the so-called center and the so-called periphery, this one is so opposed to the historical experience of the periphery's inhabitants that it poisons the attempts of the two sides to communicate. This is one of the main reasons why, for many non-Europeans, “globalization” looks like just a new euphemism for the same old imperialism and exploitation, only this time by a “world market” that flies no flag. For both the sake of a social science worth its salt, and a politics that is just and effective, it is urgent that both sides communicate. For that to happen, we need a historical and conceptual framework that makes sense of both sides' experience.

What you say of sociology's conceptual imperialism is clearly true in retrospect. But as you say, it was true of all nineteenth-century European thinking. It doesn't seem like something we can really condemn sociology's founding fathers for not transcending.

That's true. But the retrospective view highlights deficiencies that we still need to fix. What we today consider conceptualized description, most of their contemporaries regarded as prescription and prediction. We don't because we can easily see that the world they predicted didn't come to pass. But this means something was fundamentally wrong with their system of statements that we need to fix in order to understand the world as it actually exists.

The achievement of classical sociology was to grasp the internal dynamics of the industrial market society that was then just coming into existence. Sociologists distilled its basic principles out of their own contemporary experience. The concepts they developed spread out and conquered the intellectual world. They were extremely fruitful for empirical research and they had huge political effects. But the irony is that the power of these ideas, and their consequent success, was all founded on this questionable inference from each theorist's society to society in general. We could call it the universalist inference. It's false. Yet the perspective it made possible had an enormous amount of explanatory power.

Our job now is to rethink sociology so that it no longer presumes this inference in each and every one of its concepts. We have to change our perspective. This necessarily also means changing our sociological practice. No one knows better than sociologists that every perspective rests on a social foundation.

The reason this task has finally become urgent is that the explanatory power of the classical model has been steadily growing weaker. Globalization is creating a world very different from the nineteenth-century world in which this universalist inference took form. It presupposed a world of bounded and opposed societies, each in its own container, and each with its own culture, its own economy, its own identity, and control over the destiny of its own people.

What we need to do now is make the change from a universal perspective to a cosmopolitan perspective. When we infer from a society, usually our own society, to society in general, the result is naïve universalism. Globality, by contrast, is what results when sociologists from all countries of the world, having interpreted their own societies through the use of the same universal categories, then meet and confront each other with their different findings and try to reconcile them. It then becomes immediately clear that there is no longer a privileged standpoint from which society can be investigated. In order to deal with this problem, a global or cosmopolitan sociology has to introduce a radical change of view. It has to open itself up to dialogic imagination and research. In order to accomplish this, it has to rethink and rebuild both its conceptual and its organizational forms. It has to get away from using the nation-state as the underlying unity of its thought and observation. It has to get away from the North Atlantic, and from the myth that this region shows the rest of the world its future. It has to move out to embrace the social cosmos. What is happening is a mutual reorganization of the global and the local, destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever. Postcolonial voices from the so-called periphery have to play a weightier role, not only for understanding the periphery, but also for understanding the so-called center. The reason why sociologies and social theories of the center have traditionally been blind to power might well be because it's right in front of their face. The perspective of the other, sharpened to the reality of power through the experience of humiliation, has an essential role to play in understanding both sides of the power equation.

The transition from the classical to the cosmopolitan perspective in the social sciences will be analogous to the change from a Newtonian to a relativistic perspective in physics. The former has validity, but it will be shown to be a special case. However, in the case of the social sciences, this will take much longer, because a cosmopolitan viewpoint by definition cannot be the work of one man, even a genius, and it cannot be summed up in a few universal laws. It will be more like the change of perspective that accompanies the transition from a rural society to an urban one. Only this time it will accompany the transition from national perspective to a global one.

I see that many of the concepts we'll take up later at great length have already managed to sneak their way in. But I'd like to spend a little more time talking about the classics of sociology. How did they become the classics?

The most remarkable thing about the holy fathers of sociology is that their scriptures are still actively reverenced today. They haven't passed into history like their equivalents in all other sciences and most of the humanities. There is no other social science in which writers who wrote in the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth century are still such a central, living presence. Weber, one of the greatest thinkers of his time a century ago, is still one of the most influential thinkers in sociology today.

There is not in sociology a set of theoretical models that define the discipline, as there is in the natural sciences or in economics. The classics are our replacement for theory. That's why they seem irreplaceable, and that's what makes them classics. Unfortunately, this privileged role they play (especially in German sociology) is what makes it so difficult to relativize the historical content they poured into categorical form 150 years ago w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Conversations
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction: Thinking Society Anew
• Conversation 1: Postmodernity or the Second Modernity?
• Conversation 2: Individualization
• Conversation 3: Global Risk Society
• Conversation 4: Labor Society and the Regime of Risk
• Conversation 5: Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies
• Conversation 6: The Prospects for a Second Enlightenment
• Selected Works by Authors Cited in the Text
• Books by the Authors in English
• About the Authors
• Index