ABSTRACT
Environmental disasters such as Chernobyl, 9/11, global financial crises, and climate change are manufactured uncertainties and incalculable global risks resulting from the triumphs of modernity and mark the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Speaking very generally, the theorem of “(world) risk society” (Beck 1986, 2009) is conceived of as a radicalized form of the dynamic of modernization that is dissolving the familiar formulae of “first” modernity. The first-the “classical”, or “high”—modernity associated specifically with industrial society was characterized by a logic of organization and action that involved the establishment of extremely fine divisions between categories of people and of activities and the distinctions between spheres of action and forms of life such as to facilitate an unambiguous institutional ascription of competence, responsibility, and jurisdiction. Today, the limitations of this logic of fine division and unambiguousness are becoming ever more evident. The logic of unambiguousness-one might speak here, metaphorically, of a “Newtonian” social and political theory of the first modernity-is now being replaced by a logic of ambiguitywhich one might envisage, to extend the metaphor, in terms of a new “Heisenbergian fuzziness” of the social and the political.
