The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 1

Why class is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality at the beginning of the twenty-rst century
Ulrich Beck

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-rst 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 conicting social and political logics of risk and class conicts. 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 conict; logic of risk conict; social inequality; world risk society

In his article, Risk Society and the Distribution of Bads (Curran 2013), Dean Curran argues, that Becks theory of the risk society contains the basis of a critical theory of class relations in the risk society. He tries to show how not only is the risk society thesis not antithetical to class analysis, but that in fact
Beck (Institute for Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich) (Corresponding author email: u.beck@lmu.de) London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12005

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it 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-rst century. For, today one often observes a general avoidance reex among social scientists in the face of a global situation whose upheavals overtax the familiar instruments of theory, rmly established expectations of social change and the classical means of politics. Moreover, this avoidance reex ensures that the social sciences are irrelevant for contemporary public debates (Burawoy 2005). This is especially true of many sociologists who in their theories and research mainly pursue the question of the reproduction of social and political order while ignoring that of the transformation of this order. We face the epistemological challenges of a changing order of change, but most sociology asks how, in view of the present and the future and through all upheavals, the class system is reproduced (Pierre Bourdieu 1984, John H. Goldthorpe 2002, John Scott 2002, Will Atkinson 2007), the system of power is reproduced (Michel Foucault 1980), the (autopoietic) system is reproduced (Niklas Luhmann 1995), etc.1 To be sure, these authors focus on the normal functioning of society and politics and are acute observers of the resistance of established institutions to change. Nevertheless, it must be asked how far this very resistance of their categorial outlook to transformation blinds them to the explosive dynamics that are currently transforming the world. 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 nancial 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 conicts 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. In contrast, the theory of the world risk society consciously starts from the premise of the self-endangerment of modernity and attaches central importance to the question of how, in view of the impending catastrophe, the nationstate social and political system is beginning to crumble and how the understanding of the basic concepts of modern sociology and society hence,
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Figure I: Theorizing class in world risk society
Class Reproduction Transformation

Goods without bads

Bourdieu (1984), Goldthorpe (2002), Scott (2002), Atkinson (2007):

Therborn (2011): The return of class in the age of global inequality

Distribution of Goods and bads

The continuity of class in national societies Gabe Mythen (2005): Risk reinforces the logic of class distribution Dean Curran (2013): Risk radicalizes/transforms the logic of class distribution

the understanding not only of class, but also of power, the state, the nation, religion, family, the household, occupation and love are undergoing openended transformations. For more than twenty-ve years now (Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was published in German in 1986) I have been arguing that, not the social reproduction of class, but the social evolution of global risk is the key concept for understanding the transformations of modernity. Or, to put it pointedly: class is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality in world risk society. This theory of world risk society and its implications for class analysis have been criticized and challenged many times and in many ways. Dean Curran is to be congratulated on his attempt to overcome some of the blockades and misunderstandings which characterize the debate on the relationship between class and risk. In order to characterize the specics of his achievement, it makes sense to summarize the current state of the debate and to situate his contribution within it (see Figure I). We can distinguish four positions on the continuing, or maybe even increasing, relevance of the category of class at the beginning of the twenty-rst 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. The rst group of reproduction theories can be dened by the fact that they ignore the unequal distribution of bads/risks and dene the differentiation between classes solely in terms of the distribution of goods, i.e. of wealth. Here the narrative of continuity, the resistance of classes to transformation throughout all upheavals, is emphasized. My critique of the antiquatedness of the category and theory of class is rejected by appeal to the empirical fact of the enduring strong connection between class positions and income and educational differences (Atkinson 2007; Bourdieu 1984; Goldthorpe 2002; Scott
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2002). Thereby the class theorists and researchers normally miss the cosmopolitization of the poor (but also the middle classes and, of course, the elites), their multi-ethnic, multi-religious, transnational life forms and identities (Hobbs 2013). This debate suffers from the fact that class theorists, trapped in the class logic, can conceive of the antithesis to the persistence of classes only in terms of the disappearance of classes specically, in terms of a decrease in inequality and an increase in equality. However, that is precisely not my perspective. The antithesis to the sociology of class that I propose and develop attaches central importance, on the contrary, to the radicalization of social inequality. This forces us to overcome the epistemological monopoly of the category of class over social inequality and to uncouple historical classes from social inequality, something which is evidently inconceivable for analysts of class.2 The second position, which appears here under the heading of the Transformation of Class, is represented by Gran Therborns The Return of Classes in the Age of Global Inequality: We are experiencing a historical turn, not only in geo-politics but also in terms of inequality. The 19th and 20th century international development of underdevelopment meant, among other things, that inequality among humans became increasingly shaped by where they lived, in developed or underdeveloped areas, territories, nations. By 2000, it has been estimated that 80 percent of the income in equality among households depended on the country you live in (Milanovic 2011: 112). This is currently changing. Inter-national inequality is declining overall, although the gap between the rich and poor has not stopped growing. But intra-national inequality is, on the whole, increasing, albeit unevenly, denying any pseudo-universal determinism of globalization or of technological change. This amounts to a return of class as an increasingly powerful global determinant of inequality . . . Now, nations are growing closer, and classes are growing apart. (Therborn 2011: 3) What makes Therborns argument so challenging and interesting is that he combines the re-transformation of global inequality with the return of national classes. The dramatic increase in income disparity between the richest 1% and the rest is in fact a dramatic development that places the legitimacy of capitalism in question, as the globalized Occupy movement importantly demonstrates. In the USA in particular as Joseph Stiglitz (Vanity Fair, May 2012) has highlighted the richest 1 per cent owns 40 per cent of the national wealth; moreover, almost a quarter of the annual national income ows into their pockets and this richest 1 per cent controls almost all of the seats in the US Congress. Yet it is questionable whether this dynamic can be appropriately conceived in sociological terms as a return of class and whether it is not
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instead an exemplary case of the radicalization of social inequality through individualization where individualization must be understood as a precondition of radicalization (see note 2). Therborns own characterization contains some pointers for this interpretation that these developments involve a post-class society aggravation of social inequality. It would derive its primary dynamic from the heterogeneous popular classes of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and their, perhaps, less forceful counterparts in the rich world. Empowered by a rise of literacy and by new means of communication, the popular class movements face great hurdles of division ethnicity, religion, and particularly the divide between formal and informal employment as well as the dispersion of activities, for example in street hawking and small sweatshops . . . (Therborn 2011: 5) Some people might even read Therborns return of national class as an empirical justication of methodological nationalism (Beck 2006; 2007; Beck and Grande 2010), hence of the unreective choice of the nation-state class society as the unit of research. But that would certainly be a mistake. For Therborns approach actually conrms the critique of methodological nationalism namely, that the nation-state orthodoxy of class analysis must rst be broken through by a global analysis of inequality in order to (possibly) conrm his thesis of the return of class. My decisive objection is a different one, however (and here I take up Currans critique of class analysis). Like Goldthorpe and others,Therborn only captures a partial aspect of the new problematic of inequality. This is because everything that is confounding not only the nation-state class system but also the global system, both at the categorial and the empirical level, is left out of account by his theoretical framework and image of the world xated on this class difference. The social explosiveness of global nancial risks, as I wrote in 1999, is becoming real: it sets off a dynamic of cultural and political change that undermines bureaucracies, challenges the dominance of classical economics and neoliberalism and redraws the boundaries and battleelds of contemporary politics (Beck 1999: 8). It was the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy four years ago that actually plunged the global nancial system into a crisis that threatened its very survival. Combined with the global climate risk, the global nancial risk now also exacerbated into the threat to the existence of the euro and of Europe has generated a difcult historical moment that conforms to Antonio Gramscis denition of crisis. According to Gramsci, crisis is a historical moment in which the old world order is collapsing and a new world must rst be fought for in the face of resistances and contradictions; and this interregnum is marked by many trials and tribulations. (Gramsci 1971).This is what we are currently experiencing: the rupture the interregnum the simultaneity of collapse and
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a new open-ended departure which the paradigm of class theory and class analysis fails to grasp. For this is a matter of state-mediated redistributions of risk across nation-state borders which cannot be forced into the pigeonhole of class conict. The risks posed by big banks are being socialized by the state and imposed on retirees through austerity dictates. Risk redistribution conicts are breaking out between debtor countries and lender countries across the world but also in Europe which certainly cannot be read in terms of a class conict between countries. They are instead giving rise to politically highly explosive risk inequality conicts between and within European member states, as can be observed in real time over the past two years in the case of the almost endless Euro crisis. Both the epistemological monopoly of class analysis on the diagnosis of social inequality and the methodological nationalism of the sociology of inequality have contributed essentially to the fact that established sociology is empty-handed and practically blind and disoriented in the face of the radicalized, transnational and post-class society power shifts and equality conicts which are giving rise to the nancial, Europe and EU crises and are rightly agitating the global public (Beck 2013). The third position rests on a highly perceptive thematization of the distribution of goods and bads, though, in the process, the distribution of risk is subsumed under the category of class (Mythen 2005). Dean Curran, nally, goes a step further in his fourth position. One could say that 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 this way, it becomes apparent and this is also Mythens argument that there is in fact an overlap between the distribution of goods and bads. Consequently, Beck is right to declare hunger hierarchical, but his claim that the risks of reexive modernization are egalitarian completely ignores the reexive nature of human beings, who when they perceive the scope and intensity of these risks will modify their actions to avoid them. (Curran 2013:19) This is a stinging critique. However, in my book, World Risk Society (1999: 5), I also corrected my original thesis as follows: the rst law of environmental risks is: pollution follows the poor. However, whether this coexistence and continuity in the unequal distribution of goods and bads can be adequately conceptualized and explained in terms of the category of class seems to me to be more questionable than ever. For those who, like Dean Curran, subsume risk inequality under the category of class ignore and defuse the explosiveness
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inherent in the conict logic of global risks. In this sense, Currans analysis misses the key distinctions between (1) risk and catastrophe, risk and harm, (2) individual and systemic risk and (3) the conict logic of social classes and that of global risks (and their interpenetration).3 (1) It begins with a misunderstanding, which the author shares with many others. Beck tends to equate the risk society with a disaster society in which maximal catastrophes serve as a paradigm for understanding risk in the risk society (Curran 2013: 48).That is plainly wrong. Here Curran fails to recognize my key distinction between risk and catastrophe. We are currently experiencing an ination in talk of catastrophes, breakdowns or the looming end. Yet here we must distinguish carefully between catastrophe and the rhetoric of catastrophe. For example, the euro, at least at the present time of writing (August 2012), has not yet collapsed. The point, therefore, is that a possible catastrophe, which could occur in the future, is to be prevented by its anticipation in the present. This is exactly what is meant by the concept of risk in the theory of the world risk society. It stresses the need to distinguish between the catastrophe that has actually occurred and the impending catastrophe that is, the risk. Therefore, risk society is precise not a catastrophe society, a Titanic society. On the contrary, the concept of risk not only contains descriptions of how (to develop the image) the cliff can be circumnavigated and hence the sinking of the Titanic prevented. It is based instead on an image of the world that replaces the fateful catastrophe, the too late, by the exhortation to act. The world risk society is the opposite of a postmodern constellation. It is a self-critical highly political society in a new sense: the transnational dialogue and cooperation between politics and democracy and perhaps even sociology becomes a matter of survival. Generally, the talk is of crisis, here by contrast we speak in terms of risk. What is the relation between these two conceptual schemes? The concept of risk contains the concept of crisis, but goes beyond it essentially on three points. First, the concept of crisis effaces the distinction between (staged) risk as the present future and catastrophe as the future future (about which we cannot ultimately know anything). Speaking in terms of crisis ontologizes, as it were, the difference between anticipated and actual catastrophe to which the theory of the world risk society attaches central importance. Second, today the use of the concept of crisis misleadingly suggests that it is possible to return to the status quo ante in the process of surmounting crises. In contrast, the concept of risk reveals the difference of the century between what is threatening globally and what answers are possible within the framework of nation-state politics. This, however, also implies, third, that risk as it is understood is not a state of exception like crisis but is instead becoming the normal situation, and hence the motor driving a major transformation of society and politics. Bryan S. Turner (like many others) criticizes my theory of world risk society on the basis of what could be called a kind of nave risk realism, because
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it ignores the conceptual difference between risk and catastrophe. As Turner notes: A serious criticism of Becks arguments would be to suggest that risk has not changed so profoundly and signicantly over the last three centuries. For example, were the epidemics of syphilis and bubonic plague in earlier periods any different from the modern environment illnesses to which Beck draws our attention? That is, do Becks criteria of risk, such as their impersonal and unobservable nature, really stand up to historical scrutiny? The devastating plagues of earlier centuries were certainly global, democratic and general. Peasants and aristocrats died equally horrible deaths. In addition, with the spread of capitalist colonialism, it is clearly the case that in previous centuries many aboriginal peoples such as those of North America and Australia were engulfed by environmental, medical and political catastrophes which wiped out entire populations. If we take a broader view of the notion of risk as entailing at least a strong cultural element whereby risk is seen to be a necessary part of the human condition, then we could argue that the profound uncertainties about life, which occasionally overwhelmed earlier civilizations, were not unlike the anxieties of our own n-de-sicle civilizations. (Bryan S. Turner as quoted in Elliott (2002): 300) Dean Curran, by contrast, is very well able to distinguish at the level of empirical analysis between catastrophic events and risk situations; for he operationalizes these events and situations in terms of empirical indicators of spatial vulnerability (Blok 2012) for example, in the sense that the poorest live in the geographical zones in which the risks of inundation, of destruction through hurricanes and of landslides are greatest, whereas the wealthiest, relatively speaking, monopolize the least vulnerable residential areas (Curran 2013: 4462). (2) 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 (Arnoldi 2009; Matten 2004; Wilkinson 2010); at the same time, his conceptual frame of reference does not really thematize the interdependence between individual and systemic risks. However, anyone who subordinates risk logic to class logic fundamentally fails to do justice to the former as a matter of their very approach. In the context of the Western welfare state in relation to class, we still operate with the idea of (institutional) compensation in relation to global risk nobody does. Thus the continuity involved in using the class category renders this fundamental lack of any political and institutional answer invisible (or reduces it to the inappropriate existing nation-state representations and institutions).
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World risk society is distinct from nation-state modernity in this crucial respect: the social compact or risk contract is increasingly broken down. Risks are now incalculable and beyond the prospect for control, measurement, socialization and compensation; . . . it makes no sense to insure oneself against a global recession (Beck 1999: 8). As regards the state, for example, this implies the following: Confronted with global risks, produced by side-effects of the success of capitalistic modernity, the leading patterns of political organization that, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, have governed society in terms of its spatial-political and economic conguration are now being eroded by activities (economic and political) that occur between states and by processes that are not bound to the state. The outcome is the transition from a Westphalian-based system of government to a post-Westphalian system of governance, where the bounds of the state and its capacity effectively to regulate and control all manner of processes, risks and externalities are fatally compromised (Grande and Zangl 2011). In contrast to the individual risks and life chances thematized by Curran, the institutional focus on risk emphasizes the staging in world risk society. That follows from the central theoretical preoccupation with new global risk dened, essentially, as those man-made, incalculable, uninsurable threats and catastrophes that are anticipated. They often remain invisible and their perceived existence depends, therefore, on how they become dened and contested in knowledge. That is, global risks are socially constructed and dened in terms of corresponding power relations of denition. Their existence takes the form of scientic and alternative scientic knowledge. Consequently, their reality can be dramatized or minimized, transformed or simply denied according to the norms that decide what is known and what is not. Hence, they are the (more or less successful) result of staging. Crucially, therefore, global crises are extremely dependent on global new media. Indeed, when staged in the media, global risk can become cosmopolitan events with a potentially explosive global reach. In this perspective, cosmopolitan events are highly mediatized, highly selective, highly variable, highly symbolic, local and global, national and international, material and communicative, reexive experiences and blows of fate.They transcend and efface all social boundaries and overturn the global order that holds way in peoples minds.4 (3) Those who reduce the problematic of risk to that of the life chances of individuals are unable to grasp the conicting social and political logics of risk and class conicts. The conict logic of classes is a matter of the antagonisms between labour and capital within the national framework, of the organization of class interests and their representation in parliament and government, hence of questions of distributing wealth while minimizing risks for specic groups within the national hierarchy of inequality. The conict logic of global risk, by contrast, is concerned with cross-border cooperation to stave off catastrophes. Class conicts by their very logic spark the usthem
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conict specically between labour and capital and between nations. Living and surviving within the horizon of global risk, by contrast, follows precisely the contrary logic: Here it becomes rational to overcome the usthem conict and to recognize others as cooperation partners. Risk, therefore, directs our attention to the explosion of a global plurality that the class outlook tends to negate. World risk society opens up a moral space out of which a civic culture of responsibility reaching across borders and antagonisms could (by no means must) emerge. As the bipolar world fades away, we are moving from a world of enemies to one of dangers and risks. A further difference between these two conict logics is that the class enemy can be clearly identied. Within the framework of the threat logic of risk, often it is not possible to identify a concrete actor or an antagonistic intention. The threat is not direct, intentional and certain, but indirect, unintended and uncertain. It is the threat and conict paradigm of risk that sets individual life chances and institutional relations of power in motion in the globalized modernity. Risk, and not class or war, is the determining factor of power, identity and the future. The scope of the theory of world risk society is ultimately a function of the following: The socially constructed memory of past catastrophes (world wars, colonialism, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, 9/11, Fukushima) founds an ethics of never-again. The human catastrophe of yesteryear was not prevented. The human catastrophe of tomorrow can and must be prevented: This is the ethics of the never-again which is inherent in the logic of global risk (Beck and Sznaider 2011). I wonder why a large proportion of leading sociologists is content to tinker around with obsolete categories, which obscures how breathtakingly exciting sociology could become again. The early sociologists were fascinated by the newly discovered, but yet to be surveyed, continent called society.A reection of this fascination could reappear if the curiosity of discovering and testing with highly developed professional methods the unexplored landscapes, enthusiasms, contradictions and dilemmas of world risk society and its resources and perspectives for governance and action were to revive the sociological imagination a process which Dean Curran, among others, has already begun. (Date accepted: November 2012)

Notes
1. Interestingly, this is not true of the classics of sociology which were interested in the transformation of social and political systems, as the works of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, though also of Max Weber, Georg
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Simmel, mile Durkheim, etc., impressively testify. 2. This idea can be elucidated in terms of a historical example: We are the 99 per cent! This slogan with which the Occupy
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Wall Street Movement occupied public spaces (not just) in American cities illustrates the very case I have in mind. The individualization of social equality rst makes possible the radicalization of social inequality which can be connected back to class categories and actors relevant for social and political conduct only with difculty and perhaps also only from the sociological observer perspective (on this see below . . .). On the impassioned debate over the relation between class and individualization, which is no longer conned to European developments but also includes developments in South Korea and China, see Alpermann (2011); Atkinson (2007); Beck and Grande (2010); Chang and Song (2010); Shim and Han (2010); Suzuki et al. (2010); Yan (2009; 2010). 3. On a more general level, Eugene A. Rosa, Ortwin Renn and Aaron M. McCright (2013) provide an overview of the sophistication of theories centred on the problmatique of risk, which have come from the European tradition in sociological theory. The idea of the risk society, rst advanced by Ulrich Beck, who coined the term, also has been taken up by other leading European theorists particularly Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann. While different in their details, Beck and Giddens share a vision about risk that stems from the process of globalization, from the boundless reach of risk, and from the effect risk has on individual identity and civic involvement. Luhmann, on the other hand, provides a stark contrast in orientation. He extends his social systems approach to the topic of risk, seeking to understand how systems are socially constructed, how they demarcate between risk and danger, and how they manage risk. For Luhmann, there is no place for agency, that is, for individual identity or action in risk systems.This book provides for the rst time in one place a critical, pedagogical exposition of these theorists. The authors interestingly add Jrgen Habermas, who has written little about risk society, to their list of theorists who shaped risk society theory. 4. In order to illustrate the necessity of a cosmopolitan turn to risk theory it is helpful to distinguish between selfinduced and externally-induced dangers. This allows us to locate the problems of inequality and dominance within the concept of globalized risks itself. In this way, it is possible to grasp more precisely than before that there is a radical inequality in the situations of decision-makers and of those affected by risks and/or dangers. With the cosmopolitan turn it becomes evident that the distinction between selfinduced risk and external risk is a cosmopolitan ash-point, in so far as the relation of whole regions of the world to one another can be analysed in terms of the externalization of self-produced dangers, i.e. by shifting them onto others. The powerful produce and prot from the risks, whereas the powerless are affected to the core of their being by the side effects of decisions taken by others. (Beck and Grande 2010: 423).

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