Politics & Power Quote by Ulrich Beck

Beck is describing a field catching itself in the act of becoming provincial. The “first major” conference isn’t just a milestone; it’s an admission that, until then, social science largely treated the nation-state as its default container for reality. His phrasing makes the old model sound like a “course” you can simply keep sailing, even as globalization, migration, climate risk, finance, and media flows turn national borders into leaky abstractions. The question isn’t academic housekeeping. It’s whether the discipline’s basic unit of analysis has become a category error.

The subtext is a quiet indictment: “national” social science has often meant Western social science, exporting its concepts as if they were neutral. Beck’s “from all cultures” signals both a widening table and a latent power struggle over who gets to define the terms of consensus. “Wanted to reach a consensus” is tellingly diplomatic; it implies that disagreement is structural, not personal. If everyone suddenly “wants” consensus, it’s because fragmentation is already expensive - intellectually (competing vocabularies), institutionally (funding and prestige organized by nations), and politically (research that can’t explain transnational problems).

“Cosmopolitan path” is Beck’s signature wager: not feel-good multiculturalism, but a methodological pivot. He’s pushing a retooling of concepts - inequality, citizenship, risk, identity - so they travel across borders without flattening differences. The sly optimism is that social scientists can choose the new map. The harder truth is embedded in “need”: the world has already gone cosmopolitan; the discipline is deciding whether to catch up or keep studying yesterday’s containers.