Politics & Power Quote by Ulrich Beck

Beck is doing what he always did best: puncturing the comfy illusion that modern societies can outsource danger to someone else. The scene at Harvard is not just a bit of academic travelogue; it’s a parable about American exceptionalism as a form of risk denial. When his interlocutors dismiss “risk” as “European hysteria,” Beck frames the U.S. as a place where security feels like a cultural birthright, and where uncertainty is treated as a foreign affectation rather than a structural feature of modern life.

The punchline is brutal: catastrophe doesn’t argue, it converts. “Complete conversion” reads like a religious metaphor because that’s the point. Risk consciousness, in Beck’s telling, isn’t primarily produced by reasoned debate or social theory; it’s installed by shock, ritualized through collective trauma, and then organized into a new common sense. The sentence “Suddenly terrorism was the central risk” carries the quiet accusation that societies don’t discover risks neutrally - they crown them. What becomes “central” is shaped by media, political incentives, and the desire for a single, legible enemy.

Context matters: Beck’s “risk society” thesis (late 20th century) argues that advanced modernity manufactures hazards - global, invisible, hard to insure against - from nuclear fallout to climate change. Post-9/11 America becomes his case study in how quickly a nation can pivot from skepticism to fixation. The subtext is warning: if risk only becomes real when it bleeds, policy will chase spectacle over slow-moving threats, and fear will become its own form of governance.