Tim Dean - Unlimited Intimacy:

Working from a different methodological approach, the German sociolo-
gist Ulrich Beck has identified risk as the defining feature of postmodernity.
His account of the “risk society” emphasizes how environmental damage, ter-
rorism, and other instances of “manufactured risk” have saturated everyday
life during the past several decades. Because the risks of nuclear catastrophe
or global warming exceed temporal, geographic, and institutional boundar-
ies, we now live in a world where risk cannot be contained. This characteristic
of contemporary life reorients social theory from its preoccupation with the
distribution of social goods to a new focus on the distributed effects of social
“bads.” More than a decade before 9/11, Beck was arguing that the engine of
the risk society was fear or anxiety:

The dream of class society is that everyone wants and ought to have a share of
the pie. The utopia of the risk society is that everyone should be spared from
poisoning. . . . The driving force in the class society can be summarized in the
phrase: I am hungry! The movement set in motion by the risk society, on the
other hand, is expressed in the statement: I am afraid!