Ulrich Beck: An Introduction to the Theory of Second Modernity and the Risk Society

Abstract

One afternoon, during his first year as a law student, as Ulrich Beck was walking around the South German university town of Freiburg and contemplating the nature of reality, he was suddenly struck by the realization that it was not actually the nature of reality as such that he was attempting to grasp at all. Rather, it was his own view or notion of what he believed reality to be. Reality as such, it dawned on him, he could not really know anything about. This sudden realization came as quite a shock to him—as did, in its wake, the exhilarating vertiginous feeling that he might, in fact, be the first person ever to think, ever to have reached, this particular thought. A fellow student, however, later eased his mind by letting him know that the very same notion had already been entertained a couple of centuries previously by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Still, this did little to change the gravity with which Beck perceived the significance of his metaphysical insights. It was because of this particular epiphanic moment (of which Beck today speaks with a marvellous amount of self-deprecation) that he was led away from his law studies and towards philosophy. So what he did, plain and simply, was to quit his law studies and start reading Kant.