Cosmopolitan Vision

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used conceptsof second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into aradical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implicationsof globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical andtheoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war andterror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, toweave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical andmethodological themes intertwine effortlessly.

Contrasting a 'cosmopolitan vision' or'outlook' sharpened by awareness of the transformativeand transgressive impacts of globalization with the 'nationaloutlook' neurotically fixated on the familiar referencepoints of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusiveidentities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization andcosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernizationinto promoting the very processes they are opposing.

A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt torecover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitanopenness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europeneeds, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life whichhave grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religionwith awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equaland everyone is different.