Obituary Ulrich Beck: He lived what he taught – Times Online

All theory is gray? Not with Ulrich Beck. He described the “risk society” and yet was full of confidence. That makes him not after.

January 3, 2015 19:53 clock

Ulrich Beck in November 2012 in Berlin. At that time he presented his book “The German Europe”. | © Steffi Loos / DAPD

His optimism was unique, and he was also contagious. Ulrich Beck was the confidence personally, almost anthropological primed. He was convinced that education acts. All theory is gray? Certainly not in this sociologist, an exceptional figure in his profession. In 2009 he became Professor Emeritus in Munich, London, and Harvard, he continued to teach. At the age of seventy years, he is now dead.

Suddenly, in the middle of the 1980s, this was always cheerful, bright-imposing figure on stage, like once Ralf Dahrendorf twenty years earlier. He was one where you just listen and whose texts you had to read if you want to understand the world of modernity. Just as a journalist! Like the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas – with whom he later befriended – he personified the generation and era in which sociology was considered a leading science.

If you want to know who he is, was it and how to explain the enormous influence of someone in the narrow sense founded but no school with students, the book may still under the programmatic title Risk Society take at hand. It was written before the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986, published immediately thereafter. Understanding could henceforth it not only as a book for an hour, the anticipated accurate manner, as humanity moves to the edge of the abyss in their progress bliss and blindness.

Becks lasting piece of art, rather, was not to deny the apocalyptic future. With tongues of angels, you have to put it that way, he tried to convince us that in such risks we encounter the other face of modernity – our constant companion in all futures. In his view, but there was no reason why to throw in the towel. It came at the right attitude to risk. The “reflexive modernity” as Beck should call her, was born. It will remain so, he never tired of preaching: We must prepare ourselves to an ambivalence of technical-scientific world. But still he was certain that it put an opportunity for self-determination.

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Even in the preface to this book, he himself came to the glitter of Lake Starnberg. There he had retired to bring the risk society on paper, and there later they reached him often when he refrain from ever crowded Seminar in Munich and from Schwabing and black to white and to grasp the reality in concepts and explain and sought to hold, as he perceived them.

From this glitter always remained somewhat. To feel even got the his sharpest critics, he was not theoretical, analytical, stringent enough – and he disarmed by jumping with joy and humor and self-irony and sleeves rolled up in every debate. Who among his fellow professors had ever so much pleasure drawn from the objections, reservations, counter-arguments of the student or students and the academic adversaries like him? I also know of anyone that I wanted to hear as a journalist like many times as he sees the world. Not because he pretended they ex cathedra to understand, but because he was a seeker himself.

With its countless books and interference of any kind it was him again and again about yourself and to open our eyes to the real innovation in our Western, wealthy, “modern” societies: His findings of the risk society already described a huge paradigm shift. No longer the classic conflict between capital and labor, as well as redistribution issues were for him in the center, but the ecological issues of future life-world, the exhausted natural resources, the hidden sides of a supposedly linear scientific and medical advances.

He sought, in his words, “antidotes” against the poisons of modernity. The individualized society he diagnosed, not to entangle cultural pessimism around the arms. He wanted to explore ways that will not result in atomization of modern societies, but each of us allow self-assertion. He could almost raving about “craft biographies” of working couples who pursue their careers and flying around in world history, but their love and not lose sight of.

Sometimes, no, very often said to him himself and recognize his wife, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, also a sociologist therein. His response to globalization was accordingly not that one should refuse her. He tried to understand them, to control them can – be therefore “cosmopolitan project”. This, however, had its own guild finally their “methodological nationalism” buried, as he requested.