The Metamorphosis of the World Quotes

“Climate risk teaches us that the nation is not the centre of the world.”
― Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

“The theory of metamorphosis goes beyond theory of world risk society: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads.”
― Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World

“Change in society, social change, routinizes a key concept in sociology. Everyone knows what it means. Change brings a characteristic future of modernity into focus, namely permanent transformation, while basic concepts and the certainties that support them remain constant. Metamorphosis, by contrast, destabilizes these certainties of modern society. It shifts the focus to ‘being in the world’ and ‘seeing the world’, to events and processes which are unintended, which generally go unnoticed, which prevail beyond the domains of politics and democracy as side effects of radical technical and economic modernization. They trigger a fundamental shock, a sea change which explodes the anthropological constants of our previous existence and understanding of the world. Metamorphosis in this sense means simply that what was unthinkable yesterday is real and possible today.”
― Ulrich Beck, The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change is Transforming Our Concept of the World