【教学与交流】缅怀乌尔里希·贝克教授专辑：风险社会与中国＆Why class is too soft a category

　　2015年1月1日，世界知名的“风险世界”领域研究专家、德国社会学家、德国慕尼黑大学社会学教授，伦敦政治经济学院英国社会学杂志百年访问教授乌尔里希·贝克（Ulrich Beck）因突发心肌梗塞逝世，享年70岁。社会科学界失去了一位世界重量级优秀学者！本平台特此发布乌尔里希·贝克老师最近个人出版的英文论文、他曾与邓正来老师共同合作过的中文论文各一篇（当时本人都曾见证现场），作为专辑，以此缅怀乌尔里希·贝克老师，祝一路走好！

　　乌尔里希·贝克（出生于1944年），德国著名社会学家、慕尼黑大学和伦敦政治经济学院社会学教授。与英国著名的社会学家吉登斯和拉什共同提出“第二现代”的观念，力图在现代与后现代之间开辟出“第三条道路”。主要著作有：《风险社会》（1986）、《反毒物》（1991）、《生态启蒙》（1992）和《风险时代的生态政治》（1994）等。

　　乌尔里希·贝克获得众多国际奖项和荣誉，如1997年，获得慕尼黑市文化荣誉奖，1999年，获德—英论坛奖，2006年和2007年，贝克分别被意大利的马利拉塔大学和西班牙马德里联合大学授予荣誉博士头衔。

响。

风险社会与中国
———与德国社会学家乌尔里希·贝克的对话

贝克　邓正来沈　国麟

2010-5-22

图片来源：复旦社会科学高等研究院网

　　这篇对话实际上是分三个阶段完成的。一，我们所提出的问题论纲是在贝克教授访问复旦大学社会科学高等研究院之前以书面形式寄给他的，他进行了阅读和思考，并在把他的演讲稿寄给我们的同时告诉我们愿意就这些问题展开讨论。二，贝克教授来华以后，我们又根据他的演讲向他提出了新的问题并就整个问题论纲中的问题与他进行了讨论。三、贝克教授回国以后，即刻针对我们的问题论纲进行了详尽认真的书面回应并对我们的问题论纲及其顺序做了些许调整，后经翻译和整理，遂成此稿。我们想借此机会再次感谢贝克教授的支持。———邓正来、沈国麟

　　邓正来等：我们很关注的第一个问题是:“(世界) 风险社会”的概念虽说在揭示第一现代性的自反性方面有着独特的意义，但是为什么这个概念对于理解21 世纪初社会和政治的动力和转型有如此关键的重要性?
　　贝克：这恰恰是因为风险的积聚———生态、金融、军事、恐怖分子、生化和信息等方面的各种风险———在我们当今的世界里以一种压倒性的方式存在着。就我们所经验的风险无处不在而言，我们只可能做出如下三种反应:否认、漠视和转型。第一种态度在很大程度上植根于现
代文化之中，但它却忽视了否认这种态度所具有的政治风险;第二种态
度屈从于后现代主义当中那种虚无主义式的论调;第三种态度引发了
我的世界风险社会理论所提出的议题:对人为未来(man-made futures)
多样性的预期及其所具有的风险性后果是如何影响和转变现代社会的
认知、生存条件和制度的? 洞见到未来不可逆转的开放性以及理性化
(rationalization)这一特殊现代需求乃是至关重要的。我的预设是对理
性化的需求增加了不确定性。因为工业社会所造成的不确定性并不必
然造成混乱或灾难。更确切地说，不可计算的不确定性( incalculable
uncertainty)还可以成为创造性的一个来源，亦即成为允许意外情况和
实验新事物的理由。因此，与当前到处弥漫着的那种末日感格格不入，
我想追问的是:全球风险是否也具有一种启蒙的功能( enlightenment
function)以及它会采取何种形式?

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Why ‘class’ is too soft a category to capture the
explosiveness of social inequality at the beginning
of the twenty-first century

Ulrich Beck

Article first publishedonline: 12 MAR 2013

© London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.　DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12005

Abstract
We can distinguish four positions on the continuing, or maybe even increasing, relevance of the category of class at the beginning of the twenty-first century depending on the extent to which they accord central importance to (1) the reproduction or (2) the transformation of social classes with regard to (3) the distribution of goods without bads or (4) the distribution of goods and bads. One could say that Dean Curran introduces the concept of ‘risk-class’ to radicalize the class distribution of risk and charts who will able to occupy areas less exposed to risk and who will have little choice but to occupy areas that are exposed to the brunt of the fact of the risk society.As he mentioned it is important to note that this social structuring of the distribution of bads will be affected not only by class, but also by other forms of social structuration of disadvantage, such as gender and race. In order to demonstrate that the distribution of bads is currently exacerbating class differences in life chances, however, Curran concentrates exclusively on phenomena of individual risks. In the process, he overlooks the problem of systemic risks in relation of the state, science, new corporate roles, management the mass media, law, mobile capital and social movements; at the same time, his conceptual frame of reference does not really thematize the interdependence
between individual and systemic risks.Those who reduce the problematic of risk to that of the life chances of individuals are unable to grasp the conflicting social and political logics of risk and class conflicts. Or, to put it pointedly: ‘class’ is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality in world risk society.
Keywords: Logic of class conflict; logic of risk conflict; social inequality;
world risk society

In his article, ‘Risk Society and the Distribution of Bads’ (Curran 2013), Dean Curran argues, ‘that Beck’s theory of the risk society contains the basis of a critical theory of class relations in the risk society’. He tries to show ‘how notit can be used to reveal how class antagonisms and associated wealth differentials will gain even greater importance as risks continue to grow’ (2013: 46). This is undoubtedly an important step which is apt to make the sociology of class, whose self-understanding is rooted in the experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, receptive to the new realities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For, today one often observes a general avoidance reflex among social scientists in the face of a global situation whose upheavals overtax the familiar instruments of theory, firmly established expectations of social change and the classical means of politics. Moreover, this avoidance
reflex ensures that the social sciences are irrelevant for contemporary public debates (Burawoy 2005).

What I mean by this becomes abundantly clear when one thinks of the major risk events of recent decades – Chernobyl, 9/11, climate change, the financialm crisis, Fukushima, the euro crisis. Three features are common to them all. (1) Because they give rise to a dramatic radicalization of social inequality both inter-nationally and intra-nationally, they cannot continue to be conceptualized in terms of the established empirical-analytical conceptual instrumentarium of class analysis as ‘class conflicts in the class society’. By contrast, they indeed vary the narrative of discontinuity as contained in the theory of the world risk society. (2) Before they actually occurred, they were inconceivable. (3) They are global in character and in their consequences and render the progressive networking of spaces of action and environments tangible. These ‘cosmopolitan events’ were not only not envisaged in the paradigm of the reproduction of the social and political (class) system, but they fall outside of
this frame of reference in principle and as a result place it in question.

参考文献

• Ulrich Beck (2013). Why ‘class’ is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The British Journal of Sociology.Volume 64, Issue 1, pages 63–74, March 2013.

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