Beck’s risk society framework obscures ongoing conflicts over speculation

Evidence

Although risk society powerfully captures some of the anxieties of modern capitalism’s incipient subject, it plays down the profound conflicts persisting under radical uncertainty. It ignores, in particular, the collective structures of insurance and speculation through which such conflicts are managed and through which new identifications are forged in coagulating polities. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 319

Categorization

• XREF: Beck’s risk society and Habermas’s communicative democracy are being set up against Laclau’s populism — the author’s key dialectical move for this chapter — connects to: Speculation is not gambling because it deals with uncertainty, not probabilistic risk — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 54; Speculation’s rationality-irrationality tension now defines dominant political conflicts — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 66; Counter-speculation turns financial uncertainty against oppressive structures — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 69
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the blind spot of cosmopolitan risk theory is exactly where financialized populism emerged.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Speculation is not gambling because it deals with uncertainty, not probabilistic risk — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 54; Speculation’s rationality-irrationality tension now defines dominant political conflicts — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 66; Counter-speculation turns financial uncertainty against oppressive structures — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 69