Ulrich Beck’s seminal work Risk Society has dominated the field of risk studies within the social sciences for decades. Its main thesis can be simplified as follows: due to the exponential expansion of technoscientific applications, risks have exceeded – in terms of the severity of scope and impact – modern society’s ability to control and manage them on a global scale. The so-called “collapse of the insurance principle” was used by Ulrich Beck as the example par excellence to prove his point. Main technoscientific projects in nuculear physics, bioengineering, chemical engineering, genetics and (two decades later) nanotechnology are not covered by any insurance because the latter would go bankrupt if they were to insure such immense risks.
The idea that uncertainties have increased to such an extent, that they cannot be insured, is however the very foundation of the concept of risk. As Peter Bernstein showed in Against the Gods, thinking in terms of risk was enabled by an expansion of mathematics, statistics and probabilistics as a primary means to decide whether to invest or not. Insurance is nothing but an investment with the objective of accumulating capital. That which the insurance industry refuses to invest, is traditionally referred to as “Acts of God”.
Beck deployed the example of the collapse of the insurance principle to illustrate his conception of organized irresponsibility. The emphasis on this seemingly paradoxical concept was to rephrase a tension that in the history of ideas is generically associated with the modern condition, namely between establishment and progress. Whereas establishment, in terms of, for example, the constitutional anchoring of the nation state, the notion of property or the very notion of rights and entitlements, resonates with the maintenance of that which is, progress already implies that that which is requires optimization or even change.
Similar to Weber, who was one of his main inspirations, Beck understood modernity in terms of disenchantment and similar to Weber, Beck was well aware that disenchantment itself would generate new challenges to managing the world. Like Weber, however, Beck also misunderstood the process of disenchantment as primarily an ideationally and epistemologically driven one: a matter of knowledge. It is for this reason, that Beck’s Risk Society Thesis simply equates uncertainty with not-knowing. That is, risk is constructed as primarily an epistemic phenomenon, cut off from its historical emergence as a mode of real abstraction in service of capital accumulation.
The problem of conceptualizing risk as an epistemic issue becomes perhaps even more apparent when we try to deploy it to explain the apocalyptic condition of today’s world. Equating risk with uncertainty, cut off from capital accumulation, presupposes that there is a neutral establishment, often referred to as “the state”, whose interest in risk-as-uncertainty is the well-being of “its” citizens (or at least most of them). From that point of view, the state is concerned about managing risks and part of managing risks is risk communication as a means to seduce, persuade or force people to avoid particular undesirable practices and/or hazardous objects and/or dangerous entities.
Taking the example of the Covid19 pandemic 2019-2022, it becomes clear that if one starts with this position, for example by conceptualizing the state as the guardian of public health, it becomes very difficult to develop analyses that take into account other interests at play, which also invoke the state, but in different capacities and with different interests. This was then immediately exploited by forces that do not consider the state to be interested in managing risk-as-uncertainty. The main problem with understanding risk-as-uncertainty and therefore as an epistemological issue is the obfuscation of interests. To understand interests, a dialectical mode of thought could be more beneficial.
Disaffected Sociology 
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