The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues in Social Theory

Abstract

Living in an age of constructivism, the attempt to draw a line between modernity (or as I would prefer to say first industrial modernity) and world risk society (or second reflexive modernity) seems to be naive or even contradictory. Within a constructivist framework no one is able to define or declare what really ‘is’ or ‘is not’. Yet, this does not square with my experience. I cannot understand how anyone can make use of the frameworks of reference developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand the transformation into the post-traditional cosmopolitan world we live in today.