In the Name of Risk

Abstract

　 Theory of risk society suggested by social theorists like Beck and Giddens characterized the modern society since the 1980s as the emergence of global risks due to the advancement of big techno-science. For the good governance of risk society, they proposed a public mechanism to enable collaborations between experts and civil society, neither expert control nor democratic majority vote. In that respect, they also had a big impact on the theory of science and technology society (STS). In this paper, we used Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to critically examine this type of risk society, and found that the management of individualized risks in modern society is based on the self-governing triangle of “policy, accountability, and audit”. This increasing attention to risk society is not the result of the techno-scientific transformation of the risk itself, but rather the consequence of the decline of the utopian vision dreaming for a better future.