The notion of at risk has become a defining feature of discourse in the UK in recent decades, permeating all kinds of social domains. Politicians, social workers and parents are concerned about youth at risk (e.g. Youth at Risk UK 2018; Sharland 2006), while politicians task regulators with assuring that social service providers function efficiently and avoid putting the public at risk (Black 2005; Hutter 2005). At the same time pharmaceutical companies warn about lifestyle factors which put people at risk of diabetes (ACCU-CHEK 2018), while some individuals claim that vaccines could put their children at risk of harm rather than protect them against serious illness (Vaccine Resistance Movement 2018; Hobson-West 2007). Junior doctors are criticised for their strike actions which might put lives of patients at risk (Bennett 2016), the UK government is accused of putting the lives of unaccompanied child refugees who pass into their borders at risk (Dorling 2017), social services try to protect at-risk children through a new child protection system (NSPCC 2018), and professionals, such as aid workers (Roth 2015), or even lay people in everyday life (Morenne and Specia 2017), might put their lives at risk to save others. London’s port watchdog suggests that “No-deal Brexit puts UK at risk of disease outbreak” (Sleigh 2018), and environmentalists warn that our lifestyles put the lives of hundreds of species at risk (WWF 2018; Berks, Bucks & Oxon Wildlife Trust 2018). Even interdisciplinary research teams at leading British universities work on saving humanity, which has put its own existence at risk (FHI 2018; CSER 2018).
It is one thing to show that at risk has become pervasive in present-day societies but another to understand the reasons for the proliferation of at risk constructs in public debate. Has life essentially become riskier, as the increasing number of floods and recent heatwaves seem to indicate? Or do growing but unfounded concerns about the future foster at risk communication? Do organisations which were set up to protect us, for example the World Health Organization (WHO), tend to exaggerate risks in order to find more (financial) support for their mission?1 Or have organisations perhaps even shifted their primary focus from positive purpose to organisational risk management? Are the media to blame for exaggerating human exposure to risk? Or did we become used to being safe and protected to the degree that any exposure to risk has become a newsworthy scandal? But have risks really changed that much compared to the past to justify the proliferation of risk language in public debate? For example, scholars such as Arwen Mohun (2013) and Cornel Zwierlein et al. (2010) challenge the idea that the ways in which people perceive and respond to risk differs largely nowadays compared to, for example, antiquity. Then too, people exposed themselves to harm for a purpose or an expected gain, or when their life required responses to major threats. People have always had to deal with uncertain and disastrous futures and have always tried to prevent the worst. Nevertheless, the central question remains, why has the at risk expression become so widespread in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
Historians, such as Quentin Skinner (1988) and Reinhart Koselleck (1989), suggest that historical conditions shape the ideas which characterise a historical epoch and its understanding of the present, past and future. Since such ideas manifest in language (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Luhmann 1993), scholars have developed several explanations for the growing success of the risk semantic in present-day societies.
However, the etymological roots of risk are unclear. Early usages of risk words 2 were detected in the Italian cities and city states of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, foremost in the context of long-distance and maritime trading (Bonß 1995: 49). Such use of these words characterised the systematic management of uncertainty for the sake of commercial success. The use of risk spread to a range of social domains such as legal regulation and economics which are characterised by an active engagement with an uncertain future. Consequently, Niklas Luhmann (1993) contends that the notion of risk became more widespread in the transitional period between the late Middle Ages and the early modern era, which is characterised by fundamental societal changes that affected people’s consciousness. He suggests that “the problem lies in the realization that certain advances are to be gained only if something is at stake. It is not a matter of the costs, which can be calculated beforehand and traded off against the advantages. It is rather a matter of a decision that, as can be foreseen, will be subsequently regretted if a loss that one had hoped to avert occurs” (Luhmann 1993: 11). Luhmann does not deny that at earlier times similar situations were known, but maintains that, in contrast to modern concepts of risk, “even in non-Christian antiquity there was, however, still no fully developed decision awareness”, something that he considers a prerequisite for a modern notion of risk and contrasts with earlier belief in fate, destiny or a divine order (1993: 9).
Developing a different argument, in his study Against the Gods—The Remarkable Story of Risk, Peter Bernstein (1996) suggests that present-day understandings of risk are closely linked to the development of statistics and probability theory. These developments allow for the calculation of random events, and thus are able to make formerly unknown futures predictable and thereby manageable. Consequently, Bernstein (1996: 1) introduced his book on the history of risk with the following words: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature: Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was a mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.”
Nevertheless, the famous sociologist Max Weber suggested in his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) that modern engagement with the future is less about knowledge as such than about a specific way to engage with the future. As he famously suggested:
rationalisation does not … indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no long...