ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three important approaches to social risk from current social theories with the aim of ordering a multifaceted and highly heterogeneous debate. Through the revision of the concept of risk, the reflexive, contractualist and life course approaches attempt to account for new contemporaneous complexities in the present stage of modernity whose transformations are in constant debate and reconstruction on both the theoretical and empirical level. From an epistemological point of view, a large portion of the life course theory rests on the phenomenological and hermeneutic studies of contemporary sociology, where what matters are the contextualized meanings of risk. The horizon of modernization-individualization-risk, the revision of biographical narratives permanently subjected to an individual and social scrutiny that imposes risk would lead to mechanisms for individual reaffirmation and the social liberation of the individual. The chapter presents general contours are drawn for comprehending the concept of risk, which implies unraveling the operative rationality of risk and its teleological limitations.
