[2] According to the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, a risk society is "a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk",[3] whilst the German sociologist Ulrich Beck defines it as "a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself".
In classical industrial society, the modernist view is based on assumption of realism in science creating a system in which scientists work in an exclusive, inaccessible environment of modern period.
In 1986, right after the Chernobyl disaster, Ulrich Beck, a sociology professor at the University of Munich, published the original German text, Risikogesellschaft, of his highly influential and catalytic work (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1986).
Beck argued that environmental risks had become the predominant product, not just an unpleasant, manageable side-effect, of industrial society.
Giddens and Beck argued that whilst humans have always been subjected to a level of risk – such as natural disasters – these have usually been perceived as produced by non-human forces.
[9] Social concerns led to increased regulation of the nuclear power industry and to the abandonment of some expansion plans, altering the course of modernization itself.
"In some of their dimensions these follow the inequalities of class and strata positions, but they bring a fundamentally different distribution logic into play".
This argument suggests that wealthy individuals whose capital is largely responsible for creating pollution will also have to suffer when, for example, the contaminants seep into the water supply.