Beck, Ulrich

In 1986, when the sociologist Ulrich Beck published his study Risk Society, soon to become a classic, his perspective was still predominantly national. Today, the dynamics of globalisation encompasses ever more areas of society. And there are no stop signs at national boundaries that could confine the risks of globalisation. In the twenty-first century, the clash of world religions confronts national states with completely new challenges. In his latest book, Der eigene Gott (i.e., A God of One’s Own), Beck suggests that solutions to religiously motivated conflicts are conceivable only from a cosmopolitan point of view.

Ulrich Beck has a speciality. He places dangers into focus that are bound up with globalisation – global developmental disorders, so to say: financial crises, terrorism, catastrophes and climate change. “Radicalised modernity is nullifying its own foundations”: that is the tenor of Beck’s message. Basic institutions such as the national state and the traditional family have been endangered by the dissolution of their principles in radicalised modernity.

For over twenty years now, at intervals of one or two years, Beck’s books have delivered new diagnoses of social decay. Beck’s enormous publishing success began with the classic Risk Society (1986). In those days his analysis confined itself largely to a national framework. But no later than The Cosmopolitan Vision (Der kosmopolitische Blick 2004) and his discussion of the Weltrisikogesellschaft (World Risk Society, 2007), Beck showed that his theses remain tenable even under globalised conditions and could contribute to their better understanding. It is no accident that his books have enjoyed a world-wide resonance, well beyond the confines of a specialist audience.

The most recent example of his diagnosis of radicalised modernity is the study in the sociology of religion entitled Der eigene Gott (i.e., A God of One’s Own, 2007). Its central thesis is that, in spite of all its humanity, religion is underlain by a “totalitarian temptation”. And in view of the density of communication technologies characteristic of globalisation, the world religions have re-discovered their international significance and revived their networks and ideas of “community” worldwide.

As a result of this, religions have been contending with each other over their monopolist claims. The reason: the claim to universal truth of one religion tends to batter the universal claims of the others. This potential for conflict arises, Beck argues, from an either / or logic, to which religions have an unfailing propensity: either faithful or unbeliever; either included in the religious community or excluded from it.

“A God of one’s own” instead of “one God”

Meanwhile, according to Beck, people in Western societies who allow for doubt are increasingly tinkering together their own religions that fit their own lives and their own horizon of experience – they are each creating “a God of their own”, multiplied a million times. Such an individualistic faith has left all absolute claims to truth behind it and tends therefore to greater tolerance. Yet a new cleavage could open up – between those who allow for doubt and those who “barricade themselves in the constructed ‘purity’ of their faith”.

Thus Beck literally discusses all the world and his wife. Using the tools of sociology, he analyses the fundamental changes in our global “risk society” and occasionally reflects on world affairs like a philosopher. In fact, Beck, born in 1944, is not easy to put into any one scholarly pigeonhole.

He first studied law at the University of Munich before changing to sociology, philosophy, psychology and political science. As a student, he sought certainty in the diverse schools of philosophy and never balked at an intellectual adventure: “I believed in the various philosophies and theoretical perspectives and went through all the possible errors”. Coming to grips with different traditions of thought, he noticed how swiftly one could fall into dogmatism and draw the “absurdest political consequences”. Beck took his degree in sociology in 1972 and completed his habilitation in 1979.

Turning away from navel-gazing

Beck has kept his scepticism and intellectual integrity. A peculiarity of this integrity is his cosmopolitan outlook. In his view, too few German sociologists concern themselves systematically with global change. For him their “methodological nationalism” is the pivot of a self-inflicted dearth of prospects confronting German sociologists at the beginning of the twenty-first century: “In the social sciences Europe is still conceived of as a sum of national states, as if they formed a container society, each shut off from other”. That is, in his view, completely unrealistic. Europe has abolished its internal boundaries and created a common currency, resting on supra-national law. Skilled labourers from Poland, England and Italy, Beck notes, now stand at one stroke in competition with each other because their incomes are comparable in terms of the common currency. A “pan European dynamics of inequality” is now manifest that can no longer be traced to national classes.

In England, on the other hand, where Beck holds a professorship at the London School of Economics and Political Science (in addition to his professorship at the University of Munich), he thinks the openness for a change of perspective in sociology towards a cosmopolitan vision is much greater. He calls it even a “ravenous appetite”.

On one point Ulrich Beck has no doubts: the uncertainty of radicalised modernity has not only its dark side, but also its bright spots. Comprehensive scepticism has released intellectual forces for the “creative re-determination” of globally linked democracies that want to build cosmopolitan societies in a house of peace.