Second modernity

Second modernity is a phrase coined by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, and is his word for the period after modernity.

Where modernity broke down agricultural society in favour of industrial society, second modernity transforms industrial society into a new and more reflexive network society or information society (He 2012, 111 and 215).

Second modernity is marked by a new awareness of the risks — risks to all forms of life, plant, animal and human — created by the very successes of modernity in tackling the problem of human scarcity (Carrier and Nordmann 2011, 449). Systems that previously seemed to offer protection from risks both natural and social are increasingly recognised as producing new man-made risks on a global scale as a byproduct of their functioning (He 2012, 147). Such systems become part of the problem, not the solution. Modernisation and information advances themselves create new social dangers, such as cybercrime (He 2012, 69), while scientific advances open up new areas, like cloning or genetic modification, where decisions are necessarily made without adequate capacity to assess longterm consequences (Allan, Adam, and Carter 1999, xii–ii).

Recognising the fresh dilemmas created by this reflexive modernization, Beck has suggested a new "cosmopolitan Realpolitik" to overcome the difficulties of a world in which national interests can no longer be promoted effectively at the national level alone (Beck 2006, 173).

Second modernity has also been linked to the so-called knowledge society, marked by a pluralisation of different types of knowledge (Carrier n.d., 439 and 448). It is characterised in particular by knowledge-dependent risks — the uncertainties manufactured by the information world itself (Harding 2008, 55–58).

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