Beck,From Industrial Society to Risk Society 103 In the case of the lead crystal factory,the commission of the crime could not be and was not denied by anyone.A mitigating factor came into play for the culprits:there were three other glass factories in the vicinity which emitted the same pollutants.Notice:the more pollution is committed,the less is committed. More precisely:the more liberally the acceptable levels are set,the greater the number of smokestacks and discharge pipes through which pollutants and toxins are emitted,the lower the 'residual probability'that a culprit can be made responsible for the general sniffling and coughing,that is to say,the less pollution is produced. Whereas at the same time-one does not exclude the other -the general level of contamination and pollution is increasing.Welcome to the real-life travesty of the hazard technocracy!s This organized irresponsibility is based fundamentally on a con- fusion of centuries.The hazards to which we are exposed date from a different century than the promises of security which attempt to subdue them.Herein lies the foundation for both phenomena:the periodic outbreak of the contradictions of highly organized security bureaucracies and the possibility of normalizing these hazard shocks'over and over again.At the threshold of the twenty-first century,the challenges of the age of atomic,genetic and chemical technology are being handled with concepts and recipes that are derived from early industrial society of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.6 Is there an operational criterion for distinguishing between risks and threats?The economy itself reveals the boundary line of what is tolerable with economic precision,through the refusal of private insurance.Where the logic of private insurance disengages,where the economic risks of insurance appear too large or too unpredict- able to insurance concerns,the boundary that separates 'predictable risks from uncontrollable threats has obviously been breached again and again in large and small ways. Two types of consequences are connected in principle to this overstepping of the bounds.First,the social pillars of the calculus of risks fail;security degenerates into mere technical safety.The secret of the calculus of risks,however,is that technical and social components work together:limitation,accountability,compensa- tion,precautionary after-care.These are now running in neutral, and social and political security can be created solely by means of a contradictory maximizing of technical superlatives. Second,a central part of this political dynamic is the social 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