The Years and Years of Late Modernity : Ulrich Beck and Risk Society

This chapter uses the BBC cyber series Years and Years to illustrate social thinking around the most contemporary turn in modernist thinking about society. Explaining the social condition of humanity has been the focus of sociologists since the field’s inception. The basic point of sociology is to gather enough evidence to theorise why collectivised humans do what they do. Unfortunately, humans are fickle beings and unable to act as predictably as sociologists would like. So social theory is built by using the best available evidence. Descriptions are formed and predictions are made. As new evidence comes to light, new theories are drawn in an iterative and dynamic field. In this chapter, I describe the theory of Ulrich Beck who challenges the thinking of sociologists who have developed their theories of society in a world dominated by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. He argues that society has moved to a “risk society” that looks to mitigate the risks of industrial society. Loved and hated by sociologists, Beck outlines a theory for the modern world affected by climate change, pandemics and economic disaster