Ulrich Beck
German sociologist & scholar (1944-2015) · Switzerland · Academics · Died at 70
Ulrich Beck is read about 182 times a day, in 48 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 8 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 76 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He gave us the phrase "risk society" - the idea that modern life runs on invisible, ungovernable threats we can't predict or fully understand. His work turned sociology's gaze from national borders to global entanglement.
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Spouse: Elisabeth Beck-GernsheimAbout this person
Ulrich Beck was born on 15 May 1944 in Germany and became one of the most cited social scientists of his lifetime. He built his career around the uncontrollability and uncertainty woven into modern existence, coining "second modernity" and "reflexive modernization" to describe a world constantly revising its own assumptions. He argued that sociology had to abandon its national tunnel vision and embrace cosmopolitanism - the fact that everything now connects. He taught at LMU Munich and held posts at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and the London School of Economics. He died on 1 January 2015.
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