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Futures of Modernity: Challenges for Cosmopolitical Thought and Practice. Edited by Michael Heinlein et al. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012. Pp. 234. $45.
With the passing of sociologist Ulrich Beck in January 2015, we lost one of our most prolific and versatile scholars of the dynamics of modernity. Beck was catapulted to instant notoriety with the appearance in 1986 of his Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. In this book he developed the idea that modernity was being superseded by a new social formation based on efforts to define and manage the unintended consequences of modernization itself. This idea of "reflexive modernization," aka the "modernization of modernity," soon engaged social theorists of the caliber of Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash in an extended collaboration. "Risk" was in the air. Two years prior to Beck's 1986 debut, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow published his highly influential Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Though the argument seems strikingly similar, there are clear differences in the way each conceives the etiology of risk and how they connect it to grander themes like modernity. For Perrow,...