The German sociologist Ulrich Beck, who has died aged 70 of a heart attack, wanted to know how we can make sense of a world that appears to be unhinged. In his book The Metamorphosis of the World, to be published later this year, he uses the metaphor of a caterpillar undergoing a profound transformation in its cocoon, yet with no idea of what is taking place. Because of the environmental crisis, far-reaching technological changes and the inadequacy of modern national institutions, something similar is happening to us, but we are hardly, if at all, aware of what it consists of.
Beck held that our current state can no longer be captured through established conceptions of society or through the existing language of the social sciences. In his introduction to his new book he confesses: “I was at a loss for an answer to the simple but necessary question: ‘What is the meaning of the global events unfolding before our eyes?’’’ He addresses it with a social theory of a world that is not changing or transforming, but “metamorphosing”.
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