Page 133 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

128 Jürgen Habermas

being radically transformed for the better in a qualitative sense. The
pathologies of late modernity, it seems, revolve around the uneven
distribution of chances for self-realisation which systems provide. In
late modernity, the anxieties brought about by detraditionalisation
and manufactured risk are not the exclusive preserve of the affl uent.
If the search for meaning and a place in the world is hindered but
never cancelled out by material scarcity, then the question must
be one of how to incorporate those who suffer from the double
deprivation of material and symbolic resources into the refl exive
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fold. Despite its individualistic thrust, Giddens’ refl exive modernity
is in one sense haunted more by Marx than by Weber: the pathologies
of late modernity stem not from having taken a wrong turn down
a particular path of rationalisation but, instead, from not having
travelled far enough down it.

RISK AND REFLEXIVITY
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Ulrich Beck’s account of the ‘risk society’ is certainly a darker one,
but it also entertains a dash of optimism about prospects for more
radical change. For a start, there is a slightly different emphasis.
Whilst Beck sees the increased intensity of issues surrounding self-

identity, work and leisure as integral to reflexive modernity, he is,
first and foremost, an ecologist horrified by problems that threaten

no less than the survival of the planet and its life forms. In the face
of manufactured risk and the closed door on a return to nature, Beck
paints rather less in the way of swings and roundabouts and rather
more in the way of devils and deep blue seas.

Where the key conflicts underpinning industrial society have been
ones concerned with the distribution of ‘goods’, we are moving under
the auspices of the risk society, in Beck’s account at least, towards a

situation in which more and more key conflicts emerge around the
distribution of ‘bads’: the distribution of environmental, economic
and psychological risks. The ‘risk society’ is a novel formation not
because the prevalence of risks is a new phenomenon or because
we live in ‘riskier times’, but because the characteristics of risk are
different from those of previous eras. Today’s key risks implicate
human institutions to an unprecedented degree: even where risks
are not manufactured, as such, we perceive human institutions to be
contributing to ‘natural’ risks when they fail to define or predict them

adequately – consider the critical questioning faced by seismologists
in the aftermath of the Asian Boxing Day tsunami. Moreover, risks

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