Société du risque, environnement et potentialisation des menaces : un défi pour les sciences sociales

Abstract

The distinction between risk and threat offers a good starting point to think over again French difficulties facing contemporary changes, whether environmental, economic or societal. Confronted with what Ulrich Beck has named risk society, France is hardly finding answers to the complexifications born from the extension of environmental stakes, breaking with its anthropocentric heritage, moving to a dynamic and relational vision echoing the plasticity of life.Owing to the weight of its rationalist discursive tradition and its implications in terms of abstraction and distance from reality, the deep changes born from acceleration, fluidification and globalization processes are lived as vulnerability. Because of the lack of pragmatism and opening to the unpredictability of social action, French society overreacts to threats understood as a breach to its preemption of certainty and its assertion of mastery. The lack of reflexivity, of innovation and explorative capacity, the emergency and emotion tyranny result in the amplification of threats and fears and the activation of security and identity discourses which, instead of mobilizing energies, paralyse them, amplifying the sideration. We offer to analyse these mechanisms and processes in reference to the environment and its implications concerning social sciences and their necessary development.

Keywords

• risk
• pragmatism
• threat
• unpredictability
• social science
• French society