Материал: Giddens, Anthony - On Risk And Responsibility

Modernisation as, for example, Tony Blair uses the term, means bringing Britain up to date. Tony Blair has been the archetypal moderniser within the Labour Party; but more fundamentally, he wants to modernise British institutions ± modernisation carrying the connotation in this country that Britain lags behind other industrial societies in various key respects. Now this is a bit like the first explanation that Sebag Montefiore mentions for the collapse of Barings Bank ± crusty old institutions which have lost their relevance to the modern world.

That there is something in the project of modernisation, thus understood, can be seen by anyone who sets foot in the House of Lords. In risk society, however, modernisation means something different. Risk society is industrial society which has come up against its own limitations, where those limitations take the form of manufactured risk. Modernisation in this sense, cannot simply be `more of the same'.

We should distinguish here between simple and reflexive modernisation. Simple modernisation is old-type unilinear modernisation; reflexive modernisation, by contrast, implies coming to terms with the limits and contradictions of the modern order. These are obvious in new domains of politics associated with various sorts of social movements. They are obvious in motorway protests, in animal rights demonstrations and in many food scares. Second-phase modernisation ± modernisation as reflexive modernisation ± will not look like first-phase modernisation. There is an opportunity, I think, for political debate in this country to leap ahead of many other European countries in this respect and I would like to see this happen. Reflexive modernisation, like risk more generally, is by no means wholly a negative prospect and offers many possibilities for positive political engagement.

Our relationship to science and technology today is different from that characteristic of early industrial society. In Western society, for some two centuries, science functioned as a sort of tradition. Scientific knowledge was supposed to overcome tradition but actually became a taken-for-granted authority in its own right. It was something which most people respected, but was external to their lives. Lay people `took' opinions from the experts. The more science and technology intrude into our lives, the less this external perspective holds. Most of us ± including government authorities and politicians ± have, and have to have, a much more dialogic or engaged relationship with science and technology than used to be the case. We cannot simply `accept' the findings which scientists produce, if only because scientists so frequently disagree with one another, particularly in situations of manufactured risk. And everyone now recognizes the essentially sceptical character of science described earlier. Whenever someone decides what to eat, what to have for breakfast, whether to drink decaffeinated or ordinary coffee, that person takes a decision in the context of conflicting, changeable scientific and technological information.

There is no way out of this situation ± we are all caught up in it, even if we choose to proceed `as if in ignorance'. Politics must give some institutional form to this dialogical engagement, because at the moment it concerns only special interest groups, who mostly struggle outside the main political domain. We do not currently possess institutions which allow us to monitor technological change. We might have prevented the BSE debacle if a public dialogue had already been established about technological change and its problematic consequences. Enoch Powell apparently remarked that nothing affects our lives as much as technological change and he was right ± yet such change is completely outside the democratic system. More public means of engaging with science and technology wouldn't do

away with the quandary of scaremongering versus cover-ups, but it might allow us to mute some of its more damaging consequences.

These considerations are relevant to rethinking the welfare state. The welfare state was founded against the backdrop of a society where nature was still nature and tradition was still tradition. This is obvious, for example, in the gender provisions in the post-1945 welfare state, which completely presumed the continuity of the `traditional family'. It is obvious in terms of the growth of the National Health Service, which was set up as a response mechanism to illness understood as external risk.

In a world of more active engagement with health, with the body, with marriage, with gender, with work ± in an era of manufactured risk ± the welfare state cannot continue on in the form in which it developed in the post-1945 settlement. The crisis of the welfare state is not purely fiscal, it is a crisis of risk management in a society dominated by a new type of risk.

These observations are relevant to class division. J. K. Galbraith's so-called `culture of contentment' was a bit of a shooting star ± there is no culture of contentment. One reason why many middle-class and professional groups have opted out of public welfare schemes is bound up with a certain attitude towards risk management. In risk society, the middle classes detach themselves from public provision and in a certain sense they are right to do so because that provision was geared to a different interpretation and situation of risk. When people have a more active orientation to their lives, they also have to have a more active orientation to risk management, so it is not surprising that those who can afford it tend to opt out of existing welfare systems.

Ecological questions precisely reflect a world living after nature and after tradition. Many forms of lifestyle politics develop which have no precedent in the earlier type of industrial society. Protesters some while ago made a great deal of fuss about veal calves being transported to the continent in constrained and artificial conditions. Their critics called them sentimental. Yet in the light of the experience of BSE, everyone can see that this wasn't just sentiment. The protests reflected a sense of what can happen when the industrial production of food becomes distanced from nature ± or what used to be nature. A moral commitment to animal rights is, in a certain sense, a hard-edged politics ± after all, even measured in narrow economic terms, the BSE crisis has been a disaster. Calculations put the cost of the British economy at £6 billion or perhaps even more.

Risk society is not the same as postmodernism. Postmodern interpretations see politics as at an end ± political power simply loses its significance with the passing of modernity. Yet modernity does not disappear with the arrival of manufactured risk; rather modernisation, which continues, takes on new meanings and subtleties. Reflexive modernisaton presumes and generates a politics. That politics cannot unfold completely outside the parliamentary domain. Social movements and special interest groups cannot supply what parliamentary politics offers ± the means of reconciling different interests with one another, and also a balance of different risks in relation to one another. The issues I have discussed demand to be brought more directly into the political arena. A party able to address them cogently would be in a prime position in the political encounters that will unfold over the coming few years.

Risk is always related to security and safety. It is also always connected to responsibility. It isn't surprising therefore that as we move towards a world dominated by manufactured rather than external uncertainty, there is a renewed

discussion of the nature of responsibility. Widespread use of `responsibility' is also quite recent. Although the word `responsible' is much older, `responsibility' only seems to have come into the English language in the late eighteenth century. It is again a notion associated originally with the rise of modernity. As it is used today, `responsibility' is an interestingly ambiguous or multi-layered term. In one sense, someone who is responsible for an event can be said to be the author of that event. This is the original sense of `responsible', which links it with causality or agency. Another meaning of responsibility is where we speak of someone being responsible if he or she acts in an ethical or accountable manner. Responsibility also however means obligation, or liability, and this is the most interesting sense to counterpose with risk.

The relation between risk and responsibility can be easily stated, at least on an abstract level. Risks only exist when there are decisions to be taken, for reasons given earlier. The idea of responsibility also presumes decisions. What brings into play the notion of responsibility is that someone takes a decision having discernable consequences.

The transition from external to manufactured risk is bringing about a crisis of responsibility, because the connections between risk, responsibility and decisions alter. This is a crisis of responsibility with negative and positive features, roughly corresponding to the negative and positive aspects of risk. Given the inherently ambiguous nature of most situations of manufactured risk, and the inherent reflexivity of these situations, responsibility can neither easily be attributed nor assumed. This applies both where responsibility means limiting risk (as in ecological risks, or health risks) and where risk is an energising principle (financial markets).

Several consequences follow:

1.The emergence of what Beck calls `organised irresponsibility'. By this he means that there are a diversity of humanly created risks for which people and organisations are certainly `responsible' in a sense that they are its authors but where no one is held specifically accountable. Various questions then come to the fore. Who is to determine how harmful products are, what side effects are produced by them, and what level of risk is acceptable? How can `sufficient proof' be determined in a world full of contested knowledge claims and probabilities? If there are damages to be paid, or reparations made, who is to decide about compensation and appropriate forms for future control or regulation?

Much of the `social interrogation' of risk and responsibility takes place through the prism of external risk and simple modernisation. This is true, for example, of anyone who expects an actuary to predict risk, and therefore assess responsibility, on the basis of past trends; or of anyone who supposes that one can simply turn to experts to provide solutions. Coping with situations of organised irresponsibility is likely to become more and more important in the fields of law, insurance and politics, but this won't be easy to do precisely because of the rather imponderable character of most circumstances of manufactured risk. The dilemma of scaremongering versus cover-ups is a direct indication of the deep seated nature of the problems involved here.

2.Some say that the most effective way to cope with the rise of manufactured risk is to limit responsibility by adopting the `precautionary principle'. The notion of the precautionary principle seems to have first emerged in

Germany in the 1980s, in the context of the ecological debates that were carried on there. At its simplest, it proposes that action on environmental issues (and by inference other forms of risk) should be taken even though there is scientific uncertainty about them. Thus in the 1980s, in several Continental countries, programmes were initiated to counter acid rain, whereas in Britain lack of conclusive evidence was used to justify inactivity on this and other pollution problems too. Yet the precautionary principle isn't always helpful or even applicable as a means of coping with problems of responsibility. The precept of `staying close to nature', or of limiting innovation rather than embracing it, can't always apply. The reason is that the balance of benefits and dangers from scientific and technological advance, and other forms of social change, is imponderable. We may need quite often to be bold rather than cautious in supporting scientific innovation or other forms of change.

This having been said, variations on the precautionary principle can nevertheless be a significant way of reintroducing responsibility. One variant of the principle, for example, is that firms producing goods should think through the whole product cycle before those goods are released onto the market or relevant technical processes utilised. Thus in the Brent Spar episode, the company putting up the oil platform in the first place had not adequately thought through to the final point of effective and reasonably safe disposal.

3.Situations of manufactured risk shift the relation between collective and individual responsibility in many risk situations. Although in many circumstances individuals cannot be held culpable, this is not the same as non-culpability in conditions of organised irresponsibility. In the latter case, this results from viewing responsibilities through the lenses of external or passive risk. Consider, for instance, health risks. Many people get ill through no fault of their own. But a large proportion of illnesses are related both to lifestyle practises and to wider conditions of the `created environment'. It doesn't make any sense to suppose that liability in these circumstances can remain wholly with the collectivity, whether this be government or an insurance company. The active assumption of responsibility, as in attempts to reduce levels of smoking, becomes part of the very definition of risk situations and therefore the attribution of responsibility. Something quite similar applies to our responsibilities towards future generations. When most risk was external, such responsibility was relatively limited: nature was largely intact. Our responsibilities to future generations now are thoroughly infused with decisions we have to take resulting from our transformation of nature.

4.These considerations are relevant to one of the major political issues of our times, the future of the welfare state. The history of the welfare state in all countries is a tangled one. The welfare state emerged in some part as a means of holding back the aspirations of the poor and of controlling them ± it had some of its roots in the political right. In recent years, however, as described earlier, the left has appropriated the welfare state as its own project. The debate around the welfare state has therefore concentrated to a considerable degree upon its role in limiting or reducing inequality. But the welfare state is more correctly seen as a form of collective risk management. The idea that the welfare state should be understood as a `safety' or `provident' state has been raised most forcefully in the writings

of the French thinker Francois Ewald. The welfare state is tied into the basic suppositions of modernity ± that security comes from the ever more effective control by human beings of their material and social environments.

The crisis of the welfare state is usually represented as a fiscal one. If the welfare state is in trouble, it is because people won't pay the taxes needed to fund welfare systems properly. There is some validity to this, but it is more illuminating to see the crisis of the welfare state as a crisis of risk management. The welfare state was built up on the presumption of external or passive risk. If you become unemployed, fall ill, become disabled or lose your home, the welfare state will step in to protect you. Welfare systems must now confront large areas of manufactured risk, shifting the relation between risk and responsibility. It isn't surprising that there is now a great deal of talk about the need to connect rights with responsibilities. Unconditional rights might seem appropriate when individuals bear no responsibility for the risks they face, but such is not the case in situations of manufactured risk.

5.Where a society hasn't got effective means of dealing with organised irresponsibility, the result isn't always that no one is held culpable. On the contrary, the price of manufactured uncertainty is probably closely associated with the emergence of the `litiginous' society. Where a common `contract of responsibility' has broken down, culpability can appear everywhere. Here indemnity has effectively been separated from causality. I might be held responsible, for example, if someone is hurt through slipping on my garden path.

6.The theme of responsibility has to be integrated with a concern for the two sides of risk. The negative and positive sides of risk are still often discussed as though they were separate from one another. This translates into a division between two large bodies of literature. It is a remarkable fact that most of those who write about environmental risk make no reference at all to the literature on financial or entrepreneurial risk, or vice versa. Two of the most influential books to have been written about risk over the past ten years, for example, are Risk Society by Ulrich Beck and Against the Gods written by Peter Bernstein. Yet these books make no reference at all to one another.

The fact that risk is often a positive or energising phenomenon is relevant to most of the situations of risk and responsibility discussed above, not just to economic risk. Thus to create a more effective welfare state, it is important that in some situations people are psychologically and materially able to take risks albeit in a `responsible' way. It isn't a good outcome for the individual or the wider society where a person is stuck on benefits or unwilling to take the risk of plunging into the labour market. The same applies to someone caught up in a dysfunctional or violent relationship. Risk is not only closely associated with responsibility, but also with initiative and the exploration of new horizons ± something which takes us back to our starting point when the notion was first developed in postmedieval Europe.

The themes of responsibility and culpability have obviously always been of interest to lawyers. I hope I have given at least some indication as to why legal theorists and practitioners should also concern themselves with the idea and reality of risk as well.