Unbounded Environment, Risk Society, and Potentialization of Threats: A Challenge for Social Sciences

The distinction between risk and threat offers a good starting point to think over, once again, French difficulties concerning contemporary changes, whether environmental, economic or societal. Confronted with what Ulrich Beck has called risk society, France is finding it difficult to deal with the complex issues arising from the extension of environmental stakes, breaking with its anthropocentric heritage, and moving to a dynamic and relational vision echoing the plasticity of life. Owing to the weight of its rationalist discursive tradition and its implications in terms of abstraction and distance from reality, the deep changes born from acceleration, fluidification and globalization processes are seen as creating vulnerability. Because of the lack of pragmatism and opening to the unpredictability of social action, French society overreacts to threats understood as a breach to its pre-emption for certainty and assertion of mastery. The lack of reflexivity, innovation and explorative capacity, together with the emergency and emotional tyranny amplify threats and fears, as well as they activate security and identity discourses which, instead of mobilizing energies, paralyse them, underlining the stasis. This chapter studies these mechanisms and processes in reference to the environment and its implications concerning social sciences and their necessary development.