Läsvärd text om Beck av Adam Tooze i Foreign Policy.

Under sommaren återvände jag – i anslutning till ett av 4S-papprena – till Beck. Roligt att återvända till klassiker som Risk Society. Det var mer av individualiserings-tesen i boken än vad jag mindes.

Lämpligt nog kom Tooze artikel upp i flödet. Som kanske väntat; ännu en text om samhällsteori kopplad till Corona.

Hur som helst – intressant passage här, om den blandade spridningen av Becks tankar:

Risk Society had made him into one of the emblematic figures of European social science of his day. It had been translated into 35 languages. There are no fewer than 8,000 articles in Chinese academic journals that refer to Beck’s work. Somewhat surprisingly, Risk Society did not appear in English until 1992 and, relative to his standing in Europe and Asia, Beck’s impact on the academic scene in the United States was slight. For the United States’ social-scientific mainstream, he lacked rigor. Starting in the 1980s, behavioral economics and experimental social science came ever more to the fore as ways of accounting for how people form judgments under uncertainty. For intellectual entrepreneurs of the American left, who trade in exotic continental imports, Beck was not radical enough. They preferred their theory French.