Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-5wvtr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T21:57:52.034Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: Moving Targets Risk, Security, and the Social in Twentieth-Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2015

Julia Moses  and
Eve Rosenhaft
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

According to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the future and safety and have mobilized themselves in order to manage systematically what they have perceived as “risks” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). This special section investigates how conceptions of risk evolved in Europe over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the creation and evolution of social policy. The language of risk has, in the past twenty years, become a matter of course in conversations about social policy (Kemshall 2002). We seek to trace how “risk” has served as a heuristic tool for understanding and treating “social problems.” A key aim of this collection is to explore the character of social policy (in the broadest sense) as an instrument (or technology) that both constructs its own objects as the consequences of “risks” and generates new “risks” in the process (Lupton 2004: 33). In this way, social policy typifies the paradox of security: by attempting literally to making one “carefree,” or sē (without) curitās (care), acts of (social) security spur new insecurities about what remains unprotected (Hamilton 2013: 3–5, 25–26). Against this semantic and philological context, we suggest that social policy poses an inherent dilemma: in aiming to stabilize or improve the existing social order, it also acts as an agent of change. This characteristic of social policy is what makes particularly valuable studies that allow for comparisons across time, place, and types of political regime. By examining a range of cases from across Europe over the course of the twentieth century, this collection seeks to pose new questions about the role of the state; ideas about risk and security; and conceptions of the “social” in its various forms.

Type
Special Section: Moving Targets: Risk, Security, and the Social in Twentieth-Century Europe
Information
Social Science History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 2015 , pp. 25 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association, 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amingeon, Klaus, and Bonoli, Giuliano, eds. (2006) The Politics of Post-Industrial Welfare States: Adapting Post-War Social Policies to New Social Risks. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Beck, Ulrich (1992 [1986]) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Beck, Ulrich (2000) “Risk society revisited: Theory, politics and research programmes,” in Adam, Barbara et al. (eds.) The Risk Society and Beyond. London: Sage: 211–29.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Peter L. (1996) Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Bouk, Dan (2015) How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brickman, Ronald, Jasanoff, Sheila, and Ilgen, Thomas (1985) Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Castel, Robert (1991) “From dangerousness to risk,” in Burchell, Graham et al. (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 281–98.Google Scholar
Clark, Geoffrey (1999) Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary, and Wildavsky, Aaron B. (1982) Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Eghigian, Greg (2000) Making Security Social: Disability, Insurance and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.Google Scholar
Eräranta, Kirsi (2015) “A new social risk? Social-scientific knowledge and work-life balance in twentieth-century Finland.” Social Science History 39 (1): 63–83.Google Scholar
Esping-Anderson, Gøsta (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Ewald, François (1986) L'Etat providence. Paris: B. Grasset.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–9, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (2009) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–8. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste (2012) L'apolocalypse joyeuse: une histoire du risque technologique. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Geyer, Martin H. (2015) “‘Gaps’ and the (re-)invention of the future: Social and demographic policy in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.” Social Science History 39 (1): 39–61.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony (1991) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S. (2002) The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian (1990) The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hamilton, John T. (2013) Security: Politics, Humanity and the Philology of Care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffmeyer, Jesper (2007) “Semiotic scaffolding of living systems,” in Barbieri, Marcello (ed.) Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer: 149–66.Google Scholar
Kemshall, Hazel (2002) Risk, Social Policy and Welfare. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Killen, Andreas (2015) “What is an enlightenment film? Cinema and the rhetoric of social hygiene in interwar Germany.” Social Science History 39 (1): 107–27.Google Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhart (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kott, Sandrine, and Droux, Joëlle, eds. (2013) Globalizing Social Rights: The International Labor Organization and Beyond. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Krüger, Lorenz, et al., eds. (1987) The Probabilistic Revolution. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Leimgruber, Matthieu (2013) “La sécurité sociale au péril du vieillissement: Les organisations internationales et l'alarmisme démographique, 1975–1995.” Le mouvement social 244 (1): 31–45.Google Scholar
Lengwiler, Martin (2006) Risikopolitik im Sozialstaat: Die schweizerische Unfallversichering, 1870–1970. Cologne: Böhlau.Google Scholar
Lengwiler, Martin (2015) “Cultural meanings of social security in postwar Europe.” Social Science History 39 (1): 85–105.Google Scholar
Le Roux, Thomas (2011) Les laboratoires des pollutions industrielles: Paris, 1770–1830. Paris: Albin Michel.Google Scholar
Levy, Jonathan (2012) Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lindemann, Mary (1984) “Maternal politics: The principles and practice of maternity care in eighteenth-century Hamburg.” Journal of Family History 9 (1): 44–63.Google Scholar
Lindner, Ulrike (2014) “The transfer of European social policy concepts to tropical Africa, 1900–50: The example of maternal and child welfare.” Journal of Global History 9 (2): 208–31.Google Scholar
Luhmann, Niklas (1993) Risk: A Sociological Theory. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lupton, Deborah (2004 [1999]) Risk. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lyons, Amelia (2006) “The civilizing mission in the metropole: Algerian immigrants in France and the politics of adaptation during decolonization.” Geschichte und Gesellchaft 32 (4): 489–516.Google Scholar
Lyons, Amelia (2009) “Social welfare, French Muslims and decolonization in France: The case of the Fonds d'action sociale.” Patterns of Prejudice 43 (1): 65–89.Google Scholar
Marks, Lara (1993) “Medical care for pauper mothers and their infants: Poor law provision and local demand in east London, 1870–1929.” Economic History Review 46 (3): 518–42.Google Scholar
Mohun, Arwen (2013) Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, Kimberly J. (2006) Working Mothers and the Welfare State. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Moses, Julia (2012) “Contesting risk: Specialist knowledge and workplace accidents in Britain, Germany and Italy, 1870–1920,” in Brückweh, Kerstin et al. (eds.) Engineering Society: The Scientification of the Social in Comparative Perspective, 1880–1990. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan: 59–78.Google Scholar
Pedersen, Susan (1993) Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pidgeon, Nick, Kasperson, Roger E., and Paul Slovic, eds. (2003) The Social Amplification of Risk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pontusson, Jonas (2005) Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Quine, Maria Sophia (2002) Italy's Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas S. (1990) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schierup, Carl-Ulrik, et al., eds. (2006) Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State: A European Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Mark B. (2015) “The withering away of the danger society: The pensions reforms of 1956 and 1964 in the Soviet Union.” Social Science History 39 (1): 129–48.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian (2004) The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar