Beck,From Industrial Society to Risk Society 105 security claims to collapse.The other side of the recognition of hazards is the failure of the institutions that derive their justification from the non-existence of hazard.That is why the social birth'of a hazard is an event which is equally improbable and dramatic, traumatic and unsettling to the entire society. Precisely because of their explosiveness in the social and political space,hazards remain distorted objects,ambiguous,interpretable, resembling modern mythological creatures,which now appear to be an earthworm,now again a dragon,depending on perspective and the state of interests.The ambiguity of risks also has its basis in the revolutions which their official unambiguity had to provoke. The institutions of developed industrial society-politics,law, engineering sciences,industrial concerns-accordingly command a broad arsenal fornormalizing'non-calculable hazards.They can be under-estimated,compared out of existence or made anonymous causally and legally.These instruments of a symbolic politics of detoxification enjoy correspondingly great significance and popu- larity (this is shown by Fischer,1989). Ministers of the Environment,no matter what their party affilia- tion,are not to be envied.Hampered by the scope of their ministry and its financial endowment,they must keep the causes largely con- stant and counter the cycle of destruction in a primarily symbolic fashion.A 'good'minister of the environment ultimately is the one who stages activities in a publicity-grabbing way,piling up laws, creating bureaucratic jurisdictions,centralizing information.He may even dive into the Rhine with a daredevil smile or try a spoon- ful of contaminated whey powder,provided the media eyes of a frightened public are trained upon him.Dogged adherence to a line must be sold with the same TV smile and good arguments'as a 180-degree shift in direction.First the nuclear reprocessing plant at Wackersdorf is flogged through with police power,only to have to shout 'April Fools!'after others who obviously know more about it have turned it down. But gradually,one accident at a time,the logic of the institu- tionalized non-management of problems can turn into its opposite: what does probability-based safety-and thus the entire scientific diagnosis-mean for the evaluation of the worst imaginable acci- dent,whose occurrence would leave the experts'theories intact but destroy their lives? Sooner or later the question will arise as to the value of a legal system that regulates and pursues every detail of the technically Downloaded from lcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17,2012Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17, 2012