Risk Society": The Cult of Theory and the Millennium?

Social Policy & Administration issn 0144±5596 Vol. 33, No. 4, December 1999, pp. 474±491 ``Risk Society'': The Cult of Theory and the Millennium? Robert Dingwall Abstract The relation between theory and empirical data in sociology and social policy is explored through a critique of Ulrich Beck's in¯uential book, Risk Society. Consideration is given to the extent to which a book that purports to describe contemporary societies in general is actually rooted in the unique circumstances of postwar Germany. The various arguments of Risk Society are reviewed and tested against relevant empirical reports from England. Many of the historical and contemporary generalizations made by Beck are shown to be questionable. The conclusion re¯ects on the popularity of the genre in which Beck is working and questions the consistent glumness of its attitude to contemporary societiesÐwhether those of the 1890s or the 1990s. The new millennium might be a time for a new spirit and the rejection of the nostalgia and conservatism of humanitiesoriented scholarship. Keywords Risk Society; Modernity; Critical theory By comparison with sociology, social policy has only occasionally worshipped at the shrine of social theory. Although some of its founders had a serious interest in the philosophical aspects of the subject, social policy has conventionally been caricatured, especially by sociologists, as an empiricist discipline, obsessively collecting facts to be assembled into a relatively unquestioned narrative of progress towards Fabian enlightenment. Like all caricatures, this has elements of both truth and falsity. Although it is probably correct that social policy students receive less formal training in social theory than their counterparts in sociology, it is also undeniable that social policy scholars have shown an increasing awareness of social theory over the last twenty years as the postwar normative consensus has broken up and both the means and the ends of social policy have become more contested. The titular movement from ``social administration'' to ``social policy'' may be an index of this: the focus has widened from the ®ne-tuning of accepted institutions to embrace the intellectual frameworks which generate Address for correspondence: Professor Robert Dingwall, Genetics and Society Unit, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD. # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. and challenge those institutions. Sometimes the result seems like a ``cultural cringe'' in the face of those writers from the humanities or other social sciences who do this very special and dif®cult thing called ``theory''. However, it is important that the discipline does not lose its comparative advantage in asking questions about the empirical foundation of theoretical analyses: if the deformation of social policy is empiricism, that of sociology is ungrounded abstraction. This paper pursues its argument about the relationship between theory and empirical knowledge in social policy through a discussion of the increasingly fashionable proposition that we now live in something called a ``risk society''. Although its popularization owes much to the rhetorical skills of Tony Giddens (1990, 1991, 1994; see also Franklin 1997), its coinage by the German sociologist, Ulrich Beck (1992), is fully acknowledged within the social science community. Beck's Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was ®rst published as Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne in 1986. Translated into English in 1992, ®ve reprintings were recorded by 1998, the date of the copy used by the present author. Few contemporary monographs yield such returns, whether in economic capital for the publishers or symbolic capital for the author. In this paper, Risk Society stands for a genre of theoretical writing which argues that, at some point in the last 20±30 years, traditional capitalist societies, which could still be analysed largely in the terms set by the nineteenth-century founders of sociology, began to change in some rather fundamental wayÐtowards ``late modernity'', ``post-modernity'', ``high modernity'', ``post-capitalism'' or whatever. These books have had an increasing in¯uence on thinking about social policy and its response to that societyÐhowever we choose to label it. We enter the new millennium with an apparent consensus on the change, even if we cannot quite agree what to call it. Before accepting this analysis, however, its central theoretical and empirical propositions should be rigorously tested. In the space of a journal essay, this cannot be comprehensively accomplished. However, by taking Risk Society as a case study, it may be possible to assess the claim that the new century will be very different from the lastÐthe millennium may be left to chiliasts. Are we simply looking at intellectual ®n de sieÁcle or is a different world really emerging, with dimensions that challenge both social theory and social policy? The Social Context of ``Risk Society'' Risk Society is a profoundly German book. Most of the citations are to other German authors, the acknowledgements are to German colleagues and the book's drafting ``in the open on a hill above the Starnberger See'' (p.15) is lovingly recorded.1 This is not xenophobic criticism but a conventional observation that sociology is itself a social product and, as such, needs to be understood in the same way as any other cultural artefact. French writing on postmodernity cannot be separated from the competitive arena of the Parisian intellectual TV chat show, which has no equivalent in the Englishspeaking world. Ritzer's (1996) McDonaldization thesis is indelibly marked # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 475 with the experience of the uni®cation of American cultures by the mass market. The circumstances of production must be considered to evaluate any book's claim to analyse the contemporary world in general. It is easy to assume that which should properly be demonstrated, that the condition of capitalism and the alleged movement towards its successor society are always and everywhere broadly the same. Three features of the German experience seem important in understanding where the analysis in Risk Society comes from. One, obviously, is the history of fascism, of the war and of complicity in the Holocaust. A second is the postwar economic miracle and the wide political consensus between Christian and social democracy about the management of society and the economy over that period. This ideological closure is often held to have played a particular role in the rise of urban political terrorism and so-called ``extra-parliamentary opposition'' in the late 1960s and 1970s. These movements laid the foundations for a Green constituency in the politics of the 1980s and 1990s whose nature and scale have not been reproduced elsewhere in Europe. Finally, there is a particular conception of the role of intellectuals. Although this is derived in part from these social conditions, it also re¯ects a longstanding tradition in German thought, where critique has been valued over constructive engagement. Practical schools like Cameralism (Small 1909) have been less central, and less translated, than the line from Kant and Hegel through Marx, Freud and Frankfurt Marxism, which has sought to de®ne the Good Society and to chart the failure of any contemporary example to match that Utopian ideal. The struggle has continued in the postwar period, where the Positivismusstreit, the quarrel about positivism, which split the German Sociological Association in the 1960s, was as much an argument about politics, the social engagement of sociology with the processes of policy and government, as it was about method (Adorno et al. 1976). Many contemporary German sociologists, and Beck is no exception, dwell in the massive shadow cast by JuÈrgen Habermas and his renewal of critical theory. A core theme is the assertion that modernity has failed to deliver the freedom that it promised but has simply created new forms of enslavement, new obstacles to authentic communication. Empirical evidence rarely ®gures in these arguments: the response of many in the critical theory tradition can be summed up by Poulantzas's reply to a question about the extent to which his position could be changed by evidence, namely that his theory did not provide for the possibility that it could be (Bell and Newby 1977: 25). A concern for evidence is located within an entirely different and incommensurable discourse. However, a concern for evidence may be a reasonable concern for those who are asked to translate critical theory into measures of policy and practice. In reading Risk Society as a text for social policy, as well as for social theory, the foundation of its assertions must constantly be questioned. Often, it will be argued, this seems to derive far more from ``what as a matter of commonsense any German intellectual knows to be true'' rather than any speci®c social or historical study. Risk Society is divided into three main sections: an introduction of the main thesis and its contrast with traditional analyses; the application of this thesis 476 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 in the context of class, family and work; and the discussions of its implications for the place of science and technology and their relation to the political sphere. Each of these will be reviewed before a general appraisal of the book and its impact is offered. Living on the Volcano of Civilization Beck's own title for the ®rst part sets a metaphorical tone for his book. We are invited to imagine ourselves in the place of the farmers on Vesuvius, peacefully tending our gardens and vineyards while, beneath our feet, immense and unimaginable forces are at work which can at any unpredictable moment bring catastrophe, death and destruction upon us. Risk Society is a wake-up call. More formally, the book's argument is summed up in its opening lines: In advanced modernity the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risks. Accordingly, the problems and con¯icts relating to distribution in a society of scarcity overlap with the problems and con¯icts that arise from the production, de®nition and distribution of techno-scienti®cally produced risks. (p. 19) This can be unpacked into a series of underlying or implied claims: ®rst, that we live in a condition called ``advanced modernity'' or, elsewhere in the text, ``late modernity'' which is somehow different from ``modernity'' tout court, which is in turn different from whatever went before; second, that distribution in ``a society of scarcity''Ðwhose relationship to ``modernity'', let alone ``advanced modernity'', is unspeci®edÐposes problems and con¯icts; third, that these problems and con¯icts overlapÐbut are not identical toÐthe problems and con¯icts associated with techno-scienti®cally produced risks; fourth, that techno-scienti®c risks are in some sense different from other, as yet adjectivally unspeci®ed, risks. The two chapters which make up the ®rst part of Risk Society extend and develop these claims. The ®rst claim is dealt with largely by implication and it will be convenient to postpone discussion of it until the case studies in the second part of the book are reviewed. The second is dealt with fairly sketchily by reference to the traditional concern of sociology for the problem of order and the ways in which wealth could be distributed in ways which were simultaneously unequal and perceived to be legitimate. Beck's real interest is in the third and fourth claims. Risk distribution is replacing wealth distribution as a core issueÐBeck's third claimÐbecause the growth of productivity and state welfare has meant that ``genuine material need'' can be signi®cantly reduced and con®ned to marginalized groups and that the productive forces responsible for this have thrown up new and previously unknown hazards. These hazards, however, fall unequally and the problem of legitimating this inequality has yet to be solved. The faster productive development eliminates material need, the more hazards appear: in effect, modernization compounds its own problems. In one of Beck's core concepts, modernization becomes the problem in the # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 477 form of re¯exive modernization, the dog which chases its own tail and can never catch it. This is most obvious in the welfare states of the West, where the end of the struggle for subsistence has removed the prop of legitimacy from modernization and technological development as a crusade against scarcity. The bene®ciaries of technical and economic development come to perceive themselves as its victims. Beck considers the objection, to the fourth claim, that risk is not a new phenomenon. However, he argues that contemporary techno-scienti®c risk is qualitatively different. It is not personal in the way that Columbus and his crew volunteered for the hazards of a voyage of discovery. It is global, in the sense that the destruction of forests results from pollution rather than direct exploitation. It is imperceptible, in contrast to the stink of the nineteenthcentury River Thames. It derives from an oversupply rather than an undersupply of technology, as in waste disposal. These diffuse collective risks challenge the bases of the probabilistic calculations of scienti®c risk management which proceed without reference to the human beings affected by them. The result is an irruption of the political into a domain which has been technocratic and naturalistic. Risk management is an impersonal metric which conceals a range of social and moral judgements. This revelation challenges trust in governments, expertise and science. The rationalities of scientists, technocrats and citizens collide. However, the responsibility for risks becomes increasingly elusive. The interdependence of productive forces characteristic of modern societies dissolves personal responsibility into that of a diffuse ``system'', apparently an elaboration of an argument within German sociology where Luhmann (1984: for a useful summary discussion see Munch 1994: 271±305) and his followers have proposed a particularly strong version of systems theory. Everyone is cause and effect, and thus non-cause. The causes dribble away into a general amalgam of agents and conditions, reactions and counter-reactions, which brings social certainty and popularity to the concept of system. This reveals in exemplary fashion the ethical signi®cance of the system concept: one can do something and continue doing it without having to take personal responsibility for it. (Beck 1992: 33) Paradoxically, those societies which have solved the visible problem of wealth are those which have come to face the invisible problem of risk. However, those societies which are preoccupied with the problem of wealth and the elimination of tangible needÐin the Third WorldÐare, in the process, piling up problems of risk. The race for wealth may suppress the perception of risk but cannot suppress the risk itself. In the end, risk society always wins. The risk society is the environment for new political alliances and new social movements. The proletariat is replaced by the mass of citizens as the political subject. The proletariat and its organizations have been the great winners in the move from scarcity to wealth. This places them among the conservative forces in a risk society precisely because of their investment in the class society which is being superseded. In a risk society, everyone is a potential victimÐnot just those who have nothing to sell but their labour 478 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 power. The basis of solidarity shifts from need to anxiety, something which is unrelated to wealth. Money cannot buy insulation from risk. Modern civilization is a collective enemy of all. In the original, of course, this argument is stated with quali®cations and complexities to which a summary essay cannot do justice. It is dif®cult to avoid creating a straw ®gure with which to do combat rather than the thesis itself. Nevertheless, to the extent that core elements of the case shake under scrutiny, this may create some reasonable doubt about the parts which cannot be examined in the same detail. Focusing for a moment on the third claim, there seems to be a fundamental problem with Beck's insistence on the meeting of ``objective material need''. The concept of ``need'' has, of course, been a traditional dif®culty within the academic discipline of social policy (Smith 1980; Doyal and Gough 1991). Beck appears to be adopting what one might call the ``Rowntree approach'' of equating need with subsistence. This raises two further problems. One, which might be identi®ed with the work of Sahlins (1974) and, to some extent, Sen (e.g. DreÁze and Sen 1989) is that of whether subsistence becomes a problem only within a capitalist order at a particular stage of development. Sahlins, for example, argues that few people in traditional indigenous societies would ever have gone to bed hungry, except in the wake of unpredictable natural catastrophesÐdroughts, storms, earthquakes, etc. The view that they are poor and on the margins of subsistence is one that anthropologists have taken over uncritically from colonial observers. To the extent that their way of life can be recovered from historical records and contemporary observations, hunter-gatherers do not have to work particularly hard to obtain suf®cient food and to be able to possess those goods which their own culture considers to be of value. Poverty, Sahlins suggests, is the creation of an industrial civilization which measures what we have against limitless possibility. Natural catastrophes and their incidence have, of course, many of the characteristics of the risks described by BeckÐinvisible, random, collective in their impact and essentially uncontrollable by individual actors. This has, however, never prevented attempts to propose explanations and control measures within local systems of rationality, whether these have involved attempts at predicting events, perhaps by divination or oracles, or placating the forces or entities believed to be responsible, by prayer, say, or sacri®ce. (The differences between these traditional rationalities and Western science will be discussed later.) Techno-economic development became possible as a result of squeezing a margin of surplus from people living at subsistence level. The accumulating inequalities led ultimately to the situation described by DreÁze and Sen (1989) in their study of the Bengal famine of 1974, now a commonplace of development economics, namely that starvation in the contemporary world is rarely a matter of lack of food but is crucially the result of a lack of purchasing power. Arguably, for example, the success of the Green Revolution in Asia has had less to do with the speci®c increase in rice crop yields and more to do with the way in which the farmers' production of larger surpluses has enhanced their ability to participate in the market economy and to invest for the future through the market rather than, say, # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 479 through large families. The meeting of subsistence needs remains an important distributional issue and cannot be assumed quite as lightly as Beck does from his position in one of the world's most af¯uent societies. Although Beck makes some acknowledgement of this, it is puzzling that he does not extend his generally constructionist position to the analysis of need itself. Social policy has moved on from the ``Rowntree approach'' to seeing need as in large measure relative to societal context, much as Sahlins argued. In his classic study of poverty, for example, Townsend (1979) argued that goods like televisions, telephones and holidays should be seen as needs, in the sense that those who do not have access to them are signi®cantly excluded from participation in the society in which they live. Whatever the force of Beck's argument in relation to objective need, it is implausible to argue that these relative needs can be met without a concern for wealth distribution which he rejects as a phenomenon of a disappearing past. We may accept that the rich will always have more than the poor: on the other hand, many of the things which the rich have todayÐInternet access, for exampleÐwill come to be seen as necessities of civilized life tomorrow. The widening economic inequalities seen in many societies do not suggest that the problem of distribution can be treated as closed, even if the bases for mobilization are less immediately obvious than to the observers of nineteenth-century industrial work. Risk Society seems uncertain about whether it is posing a new social distribution of risk or treating risk as a collective threat. If the emphasis is on distribution, then it may be very hard to disentangle from the distributional issues around wealth. Poverty also brings an increased exposure to risks of accidents, morbidity and premature death. Hazardous occupations do not pay the risk premium that neo-classical economics would predict (Felstiner et al. 1989). To a considerable extent, the rich can buy insulation from risk. It is no accident that better-off people have tended to live to the South and West of British industrial cities where the prevailing wind takes the pollution in the opposite direction. Beck suggests that the risks of the contemporary world are not susceptible to this kind of avoidance. It may be more accurate to argue, however, that the rich have simply not yet discovered how to avoid them. An important counter-example to Beck's thesis is that of epidemic disease. It is widely accepted by social historians that an important in¯uence on the effort to clean up British cities in the nineteenth century was the recognition by the wealthy that diseases like cholera were a threat to their own health as much as to the health of the poor, just as Beck describes for radiation or atmospheric pollution. The theoretical basis for these interventions was miasmatic and non-speci®c, that disease generally resulted from foul odours, rather than bacterial and speci®c, but the interventions were nevertheless effective. The actual impact of these diseases was just as associated with the distribution of wealth as any modern diseaseÐthe poor died from cholera in greater numbers than the rich, just as it is still the poor who die earlier from myocardial infarctions and most other causes. However, everyone was exposed to miasmas and any move to reduce these would bene®t the rich, even if it actually gave an even greater bene®t to the poor in terms of absolute reductions in mortality. The paradox of 480 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 scienti®c advance in medicine is that it has in some respects become easier for the rich to insulate their health from that of the poor. If we know that cholera is caused by a bacterium, which is transmitted only through contaminated water supplies, can be resisted by vaccination and successfully treated by speci®c therapy, we can buy our own supply of clean water and our own medical facilities and cut ourselves off from other social groups who remain exposed to this hazard. Education about health may increase rather than diminish inequality, as those least at risk lead the way in changing their environment and lifestyle further to reduce thisÐa new twist on the ``Inverse Care Law'', that those least in need of health services tend to receive more of them (Tudor Hart 1971). As an example, cholera has its limitations because of the ``obviousness'' of the miasma, although Beck stands back again from his own constructionism. Did the River Thames really smell any worse when Parliament was obliged to suspend its sittings on hot days in the summer of 1858 or was it that sensibilities had changed? Even today cities have characteristic smells which pass all but unnoticed to their own residents but strike directly at visitors. Plague may be a better example, a peril which stole up on Europe from time to time for a period of ®ve hundred years. Again, the rich could not consciously buy insulation, except by ¯ight, which was only a limited guarantee of security. In a comparison of responses to epidemic disease from the Black Death to AIDS, Strong (1990) has shown a characteristic pattern of societal reaction from fear, insecurity, a manic casting around for explanations, and a sense of panic that civilization itself was under threat, to a recognition that one of life's nuisances had come around again but that enough of us would survive to carry on. All risks were eventually routinized. If it is arguable that neither the nature of risk nor its association with the distribution of wealth is particularly new, then doubt must be cast on Beck's fourth claim. Is it simply the case, as Strong's argument suggests, that the contemporary risks which he identi®es have yet to be absorbed by the historic processes of risk management which seem to recur widely across human time and space, even if it is too grand and unveri®able a claim to suggest that they characterize all human societies? Perhaps there is, at most, a particular congestion of risks which has placed these processes under an unfamiliar strain? The term ``risk management'' is, of course, used here in a wider sense than Beck employs it, to acknowledge that the mathematical technologies of insurance or risk assessment are not the only means by which humans seek to manage risk. The Aztec captive sacri®ced to manage the risk that the sun will not rise tomorrow is the functional equivalent of an insurance policy for the parish fete to cover losses due to rain. In fact, the encounter of preColumbian America with the conquistadores is a helpful model for the loss of trust in government and expertise. These societies fell apart less as a result of the superior military technology of the Spanish than from the sight of absolute rulers and their priest class simply being unable to sustain claims to control relations between the human, divine and natural worlds. There are clearly differences between the theologically-based claims of the Inca or Aztec emperors and priests and the claims of modern governments to manage the risks of life by techno-economic means: however, the sociological # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 481 question is surely whether these are really more important than the similarities. The wider politics of Beck's analysis recur as themes throughout, and it will be more convenient to deal with them later when the general thesis has been more fully tested. The Individualization of Social Inequality The second part of Risk Society focuses on the distributional logic of the risks held to be associated with advanced modernity. Re¯exive modernization is destroying the social forms of industrial societyÐclass, family, gender, marriage, parenthood, occupationsÐin the shapes we have known them. There is a surge of individualization so that the ascribed fate of classes and their members becomes the achieved fate of individuals. The dissolution of classes forces people into a narcissistic preoccupation with planning and managing their own lives. Social crises such as mass unemployment are reduced to aggregates of individual failures. The family becomes ``negotiated'', an assembly of individuals who will stay together only as long as selfinterest dictates. Individualization is, though, deceptive: it works only so long as it matches the standards imposed upon it by institutions, most notably those associated with the labour market. This contradiction may form the basis of new social movements, a search for the reality of individualism and freedom from control which is always vulnerable to colonization by the very institutions it opposesÐthink of the use of street music to sell mass-produced soft drinks or the development of ``ethnic'' burger products by international franchises. These issues are explored through discussions of class, gender, families and labour markets. Given the space available, only the issues around families will be examined here. Beck's analysis of these may be less distinctive than some other parts of his argument but this may allow it to serve better as a case study. He begins by asserting what is at one level an uncontroversial proposition among sociologists, that discussions of the organization of the family and of gender relations cannot be wholly separated from discussions of the organization of work, occupations and the market. Traditional gender roles are dissolving, although the legitimacy of distinction is changing faster than the reality. Men and women are not fully equal but discrimination is no longer publicly acceptable. However, these are not changes as a result of processes in the private sphere alone but the result of the reconstruction of the private sphere by the public. The version of family life which served an earlier phase of modernity is no longer viable and is being destroyed by re¯exive modernization. According to Beck, this process has three aspects. First, the gendered division of labour ``is the basis of industrial society'' (p.104). The separation of male and female roles by nineteenth-century capitalism is the foundation of the nuclear family and of women's dependence upon men. Wage labour presupposes housework. The contractual nature of market relationships presupposes the communality of marriage. One's place in the division of 482 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 labour is ascribed from birth according to gender. However, the advance of industrial society throws up increasing contradictions, comparable to those described by Marx for social classes. Relationships of dependency and statuses of ascription, located outside the market, are increasingly anachronistic. Men and women cannot be equalized within structures that assume their difference and inequality. As women are brought into the market and achieve economic independence by their own merits, the traditional industrial family is less and less attractive. Second, the onward march of individualization creates a need for partnership which it simultaneously undermines. To introduce Durkheim's language, as men and women are released from the predetermined roles and status fates of mechanical solidarity, they are driven to search for an emotional community of organic solidarity. That dream is, however, always undercut by the assertion of individualism, that the relationship must satisfy each member's self-interest. The lives of men are less affected directly by this: economic individualization joins directly to masculine behaviour. The lives of women are in tension between the demands of career and of homemaking. Women's individualization turns them against men's ``failures'' as homemakers, as it turns men against women's ``sel®shness''. This is compounded by the third aspectÐthe culture of choice. If we choose our fates, then we are responsible for them, and it is increasingly dif®cult to avoid choosing in a market where everything is held to be open. Beck points to the tensions around the labour market's demand for personal mobility, the notion that both spouses have a right to an individual career and their desire for an affective relationship which can satisfy their individual desires. These are aggravated by the presence of children: indeed, the market society is ultimately a childless one, unless the children are associated with single, mobile parents. The point might be added that even this is questionable if one accepts the argument that children are also individuals with individual rights. For the present, though, parenthood is the last primary relationship and absorbs all the emotions and commitments that can no longer be poured into marriage. Beck speculates about three possible futures: the reconstitution of the nuclear family by mass unemployment and social security arrangements which reinstate women's dependency on men; the acceptance of a ``fully mobile society of singles'' which fails to meet the affective needs of both sexes and is sustainable only by heavy investment in friendships; and a rather vaguely speci®ed third way of seeking to provide stronger institutional supports for familiesÐin employment opportunities, housing, day care and social securityÐwhile allowing individuals more freedom to work out their own division of labour as a matter of choice. Beck is pessimistic about the likelihood of any of these solutions emerging or being wholly satisfactory. However, there may be some consolation in recognizing that the troubles with which men and women reproach each other are a matter of social structures rather than individual failings. This has some echoes of the ways in which systems theory undermines individual responsibility, which Beck criticized in an earlier chapter of Risk Society. However, there are two more fundamental problems with his analysis. # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 483 One relates to the implied history and the other to the evidence of a collision between individual rights and human needs. The ®rst of these returns to Beck's claim that modernity is somehow different from previous forms of society. Here it is allied to a speci®c assertion that the nuclear family is an invention of modern industrial societies. The notion that the modern world is very different to its predecessors is fundamental to sociology. It is the explicit or implicit contrast at the heart of all the classical writersÐMarx, Spencer, Weber, Durkheim. The problem is that this opposition is formulated as a matter of vague generalities and, in many cases, as a contrast between an Arcadian past and an inhuman future. If it is reduced to a series of more speci®c propositions, as contemporary social and economic historians have sought to do, then its empirical validity becomes seriously questionable. The idea that a new form of family emerged during the nineteenth century is a good example (see the general discussion in Dingwall and Eekelaar 1988). The evidence to support this claim is not very convincing for EnglandÐalthough it may be defensible for Germany and other parts of the European mainland (Flandrin 1979; Anderson 1980). The English have tended to live in relatively small family groups for as long as anyone can record (Wrigley and Scho®eld 1981). For most ordinary people, marriage was a voluntary relationship regulated mainly by community sanctions, certainly until the arrival of civil registration in 1836 and arguably well beyond (Parker 1990). Extensive provision was still required after the First World War for the payment of pensions to dependants of servicemen killed in action who were recognized as their spouses but not joined in a legal relationship. Conversely, in a society before computers, people who wanted to leave a marriage could and did literally walk away. The English were a remarkably mobile people from the earliest times (Clark 1979). They had a strong sense of individualism, even under a pre-capitalist economy (Macfarlane 1979) and a strong sense of romantic attachment (Macfarlane 1970). Ordinary women always worked in large numbers, in household production or agriculture and enjoyed considerable de facto economic independence. This was stimulated by the industrialization of employment: Anderson (1971) records the complaints of early nineteenthcentury Lancashire mill towns about the behaviour of young women earning good wages in the textile factories. To be sure, Beck makes his argument in relation to what he describes as the bourgeois model of the family. In doing so, however, he disregards both the remarkable persistence of alternative forms, and the extent to which the so-called nuclear industrial family is evident well before the dominance of that mode of production, at least in England. It should, perhaps, be conceded that England always presented a problem for European mainland sociologists because of the dif®culty of ®tting it to their models of capitalist developmentÐas in Weber's argument for the necessity of formally-rational law, which England did not have, as a precondition for the emergence of a capitalist economy (Weber 1954). However, the classic thesis is stated as a general proposition and its inapplicability to the English case is a serious methodological problem, even if we do not adopt a strict falsi®cationist position and demand its entire rejection. This problem should also encou484 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 rage us to look more closely at the contrast between modern and pre-modern societies and the extent to which a ®ctionalized past is used either as a basis of criticizing the present, as in the work of Marx, Weber and other German contemporaries, or celebrating it, as in the case of Spencer and, to a lesser extent, Durkheim. We might also ask why the former lives as a tradition so much more strongly than the latter. The second problem with Beck's argument about the family is the source of his assertions about a fundamental human need for certain kinds of relationships. The more individualized we become, the more we are driven to seek a shared inner life, he argues. There is no citation that supports this claim or allows it to be traced back to some empirical study. In effect, its only authority is its location within a particular chain of philosophical anthropology, which re¯ects upon the human condition in a quasi-theological fashion. Indeed, God is never very far away in this chapter and Beck is clearly concerned about what might replace the Divine as the foundation of morality and ethical human interrelations. This type of argument is not testable in any sense that an Anglo-Saxon empiricist would recognize: it cannot be speci®ed in ways that make it either falsi®able or veri®able. Either the story is persuasive or it is not. Its persuasiveness depends upon an interaction in which the author and the text meet a reader who brings his or her own framing to both the medium and the content. Read within a tradition of critical theory, it evokes many echoesÐof Habermas, of Fromm and Marcuse, or of a theologian like Buber and his search for authentic community in ``I±Thou'' relationships. Read outside that hermetic and self-referential tradition, it may seem empty, particularly as the effect is to exclude the obvious fourth possibility, that people may choose commitment over individual rights. If the essence of social order is cooperation and negotiation, as many microsociologists would argue, why should family life be any different? Clearly new family forms in new structural environments may impose new contingencies on the negotiation. However, if hunter-gatherers, or gatherer-hunters, could, without the help of professional sociologists, work out divisions of labour consistent with the reproduction of their societies, it seems strange to suppose that contemporary men and women cannot do the same. There are dangers in the drift towards a rights-oriented society, which may be seen as a version of re¯exive modernization in the way that the unregulated pursuit of rights undercuts the possibilities of community, but these are well recognized and do not seem to be insoluble (e.g. Friedman 1987; Selznick 1992; Etzioni 1996). Science and Politics The third part of Risk Society aims to pull together the argument about re¯exive modernization, as expressed in the logic of risk distribution and the advance of individualization, through a study of science and technology and their relationship to politics. Individualization has destroyed the traditional bases of authority in the industrial society, traditional in the sense that they are the replacements for the forms of authority that held sway in the feudal agrarian society that industrialization itself destroyed. One of these is the # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 485 prestige of science and technology, which are seen merely as particular belief systems rather than as windows on truth. This view is reinforced by the role of science and technology both in wealth creation and in revealing the risk associated with that process. One of the paradoxes of re¯exive modernization is that the scientists' work in the discovery and delineation of risk becomes the basis for the discrediting of science as a risk-generating exercise. In the interests of brevity, this discussion will again focus on one part of the development of this argument, Beck's discussion of medicine, which he himself presents as ``an extreme case study''. Beck professes himself agnostic on whether medicine has actually improved the well-being of humankind. However, he argues, it is indisputable that it has contributed to the increase of population through ``improvements in hygiene which would have been unthinkable without the results of medical research'' (p. 204). In advanced modernity, medicine produces more diseases than it can treat, in the sense that the advance of diagnosis allows the labelling of chronic illnesses without the means to cure them. Medicine has taken illness away from people and systematically increased their ignorance. Professionalization has gone hand in hand with the medicalization of everyday life as power has been removed from the public arena by the profession to act without the consent of the public who are the objects of its technology. Beck quotes the example of in vitro fertilization, where a technology is introduced because of its possibility and a cultural revolution (of fatherless motherhood) made possible, without anyone other than genetic specialists choosing this. The foundations of the family, marriage and intimate relationships are being destroyed without challenge or question. The profession's control of the cognitive development of medicine gives it the opportunity both to create risks and to pro®t by their management. At the same time, the awareness of those risks undermines its credibility as individuals choose the systems of health theory which appeal to them. Medicine is one of the great monopolies of industrial society which will break up unless it can institutionalize self-criticism and diversity. The account of medicine given here probably has more in common with the polemics of Ivan Illich (1977) than with anything that a medical sociologist or social historian of medicine would regard as evidentially justi®able. Although the pure form of the ``McKeown thesis''Ðthat medicine had virtually nothing to do with the reduction in mortality in industrial societies from 1840 to the 1950sÐnow has few supporters, even his critics accept that clinical intervention played a minimal part in this process. Beck's argument may be partly a matter of different historical experiences and institutional structures. Critics of McKeown (1976, 1979), like Winter (1982) and Szreter (1988), have argued convincingly that he understates the role of public health doctors in the promotion of hygienic measures. However, under English government structures, doctors could only act with the support of local civic leaders and in partnership with sanitary engineers and other urban technologists. Arguably, the situation in Prussia, where social medicine developed a more central role, would justify Beck's statementÐwhich underlines the earlier point about not mistaking a particular national experience for a general feature of modernization. The centrality of nosology in medicine goes into the mists of antiquity. The 486 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 starting point of any system of medicineÐallopathic, complementary or traditionalÐis the naming of problems. Correct naming is the foundation of correct therapy. In that process, there have always been conditions for which there are names but no unique and effective therapy. To the extent that one can still talk about progress, much of this has involved the dissection of categories, so that those which do not respond to some therapy are taken out and become a starting point for new investigations. The historical dynamic of medicine involves a constant movement from loosely speci®ed and empirically treated problems to differential diagnosis and speci®c therapy. There is no reason to think that what we are seeing today is fundamentally different. The empirical problems of the medicalization thesis were well established by Strong (1979) when he pointed out the error of taking the pronouncements of moral entrepreneurs within the medical community as representative. The discussion of in vitro fertilization takes no account of the speed with which the UK government at least moved to regulate the technology, and the assertion that it uniquely permits fatherless motherhood overlooks the simple and widespread use of the turkey-baster, a low-technology, popularly controlled intervention said to be much favoured by lesbians seeking to conceive. The monopoly theory of professionalization has come under increasing criticism since the mid-1980s and the extent to which this rests on a conjunction of occupational, market and state interests in the supply of regulation, rather than on the capture of the state by a well-organized group demanding favourable regulation, has been identi®ed as an important issue for investigation (Dingwall 1999). Again, Beck may have been misled by the national differences: the German medical profession has a tighter legal monopoly than in the UK or the USA and has been notoriously resistant to state intervention in its affairsÐpartly because of the shadow of the Nazi experience and the consequences of that intervention for the profession and its patients. Arguably, it is in the conclusion that Risk Society demonstrates most crucially the limits of its author's approach to science and technology. On the one hand, the proposal that self-criticism needs to be institutionalized seems to accept far too much of the constructionist critique of scienti®c knowledge and practice. The issues are well discussed in Horton's (1967) comparison of African traditional thought and Western science, which draws out the importance of the institutionalized commitment to the testing of knowledge that distinguishes the latter. The Azande do not systematically investigate the correctness or otherwise of their oracles. Of course it is important not to over-idealize Western scienceÐit is well documented that much work is essentially routine, that paradigms are not easily shifted and that much of the time both scientists and the users of science think in a commonsense way about it. Nevertheless, the ideal is a regulator of practice and there are few sectors where it is as ®rmly entrenched as medicine. The ``evidence-based medicine'' projectÐthat only therapies proven to be effective by the best available tests should be employedÐhas many fundamental philosophical ¯aws, but its critical spirit cannot be denied. Beck's unhappiness with systems thinking also seems to lead him away from the importance of competition as a check. This functions at many levels: from the # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 487 interaction between medicine and law in regulation and tort litigation (Dingwall 1994), to the rivalry between corporations to secure markets, to that between governments, as in the allegations that the German government pressed for strict regulation of genetically-modi®ed food trials to rein back the technological lead of the British biotechnology industry over its German counterpart. Beck sees a corporatist world of monopolies where others might be more struck by the long-term power of creative destruction. Would a scholar in 1500 have seen the potential break-up of the monopoly of the Catholic Church any more than a scholar in 1970 would have foreseen the decline of IBM? On the Place of Grand Theory Although this paper has been a critique of one book, its objective from the outset has been to treat this as representative of a genre. Risk Society stands in a line which stretches back to the classical theorists who founded the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century. In this sense, sociology is also an expression of modernity. There are frequent complaints that such books are now rarely written, although greatly valued. If one considers the source of these complaints, however, they seldom come from working sociologists, who observe the profusion of attempts to market oneself as the new Max WeberÐironically, of course, it is only the selective bias of the market for translations that has obscured the scale of Weber's activity as an empirical sociologist. More commonly, these complaints seem to come from people schooled in a humanities tradition, where critical theory has found a ready home in recent years, whether in universities, in intellectual magazines or the review sections of the broadsheet press. The complainants start from an a priori hostility to the contemporary worldÐconsider the neglect of Spencer or Parsons, for example, although both had strong arguments that the ends of liberty, justice and equality would be better served by the spontaneous order of a market society than by one which re¯ected the imposition of the economic and moral preferences of some philosophermonarch. All that is required to feed their demands is a well-stuffed armchairÐor an open hillside above the Starnberger See exposed to the play of the light, the wind and the waves and protected from the intrusions of children and animalsÐand a suf®ciently gloomy disposition. It was not for nothing that Philip Strong used to call sociology a ``glum science'', convinced that all change was for the worse and that contemporary civilization was doomed. With the added incitement of the eve of the millennium, much of this work is more reminiscent of cultic books and other popular expressions of ®n de sieÁcle weariness than with the challenges of a dif®cult century. Perhaps, however, there is a chance to take an alternative turn and to declare our indifference to the judgement of the humanities. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon saw that science and technology would not advance while they remained obsessed with high levels of abstraction and generalization: The understanding must not . . . be allowed to jump and ¯y from 488 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 particulars to remote axioms and of almost the highest generality (such as the ®rst principles as they are called of arts and things), and taking stand upon them as truths that cannot be shaken, proceed to prove and frame the middle axioms by reference to them; which has been the practice hitherto . . . we hope well of the sciences, when in a just scale of ascent, and by successive steps not interrupted or broken, we rise from particulars to lesser axioms; and then to middle axioms, one above the other; and last of all to the most general. For the lower axioms differ but slightly from bare experience, while the highest and most general (which we now have) are notional and abstract and without solidity. But the middle are the true and living axioms, on which depend the fortunes and affairs of men . . . (Bacon 1858: 97) Almost four hundred years later, Glaser and Strauss (1967) tried to de®ne a similar programme for sociology out of the traditions particularly associated with the University of Chicago from the early 1900s until the 1950s, a call reinforced at the very end of his life by Goffman (1983) in offering, at the close of his ASA Presidential Address, to trade the whole of sociology for some decent conceptual distinctions and a cold beer. Social policy scholars should not need to be reminded of their discipline's traditional virtue of empirical work. 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