Risk, calculable and incalculable

Abstract

This paper starts with two approaches to risk : the sociological approach of Ulrich Beck and the 'governmentality' account based on Michel Foucault's theses. Beck's approach is characterized as totalizing, realist, and relying on a uniform conception of risk. Moreover, his narrative of the emergence of risk society founders on the untenable binary, calculable/incalculable. Using Francois Ewald on social insurance, the paper argues that risk is better approached as a form of calculative rationality, a way of rendering the incalculable calculable. The governmental account allows us to analyse specific forms of risk rationality and technology, the types of agency and identity involved in practices of risk, and the political and social imaginaries to which these practices are linked. The governmental account, however, encounters difficulties in grasping the more general transformations of contemporary regimes of government. In this respect, Beck's notion of reflexivity is extremely useful. The paper then delineates various types of risk rationality (insurance, epidemiological, clinical, and case-management risk, and comprehensive risk management) and places them in an analytic of contemporary government. It concludes that one of the conditions of these new forms of government is the 'governmentalisation of government'. Rather than 'the death of the social', it is better to understand this analytic as charting a transformation of the liberal problematic of security and the emergence of 'reflexive government'