Risk as a Forensic Resource

Abstract

THE WORD RISK HAS ACQUIRED NEW PROMINENCE. One popu lar explanation is that risks from technology have greatly increased. They have indeed, in all the industrial world. But some other risks have decreased, at least if the figures for mortality and morbidity mean anything. So perhaps what needs to be ex plained is the greater political awareness from technology in Amer ica, greater awareness than in France,1 and presumably greater than in Russia before Chernobyl. Some would explain the new use of the vocabulary of risk in American politics by the revival of laissez-faire liberal economics. In this volume Theodore Lowi shows how the nineteenth-century idea of the merits of individual risk taking have been reintroduced into American politics. Praise of risk taking invokes the virtues of frontier morality to interrupt the long, slow move to establish collective responsibility for accidents. However, this ideological change itself needs to be explained. American polit ical history does not account for the market ideology renascent in Britain, and in China, and more recently in Russia and Eastern Europe. The question is why a changed political debate goes across national boundaries, couched in terms of risk. The answer here suggested is that a culture needs a common forensic vocabulary with which to hold persons accountable and further that risk is a word that admirably serves the forensic needs of the new global culture. The object of this essay is to situate the notion of risk by comparing its current usage with similar concepts in other times and places. In