Hippe: Editorial: Social Science Education in the Financial Risk Society

Journal of Social Science Education:

Volume 9, Number 2, pp 2-5, © JSSE 2010, ISSN 1618-5293

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Risk society is a catastrophic society.
In it, the exceptional condition threatens to become the norm.
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (1986)
After the catastrophe of the great depression in the early 1930s, intense political efforts were undertaken to ensure that such a calamity (and its political consequences) won’t ever set the world on fire again. Indeed, after the Second World War, the economic system of the Western world experienced a lengthy period of basic economic stability and security, which led some authors to speak of the post-war era as a “golden age of capitalism” (Marglin/Schor 1992). Most importantly, for ordinary people, the economic world had become not only a more prosperous, but also a safer, more secure and trustworthy place.
Despite temporarily rising inflation and gradually increasing unemployment rates in some countries since the mid 1970s, most people’s sense in Western countries’ middle classes still was a feeling of basic economic security. In contrast to the situation in many developing countries, the mind of the Western middle classes was shaped by the (unconscious) conviction that – in general – you can rely on the institutions of the market economy, the trustworthiness of its major players, the honesty of its regulators, the absence of blatant economic injustice, the appropriate legal punishment of outright economic fraud and irresponsibility, and so on. Seldom and rather limited incidents which contradicted these expectations were rather taken as exceptions which proved the rule.