In the contemporary context, it is perhaps comparable with Thomas Picketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty First Century ( Citation2014). It is interesting to speculate about the numbers of people who bought Risk Society ( Citation1992) expecting a racy account of looming catastrophe and the endemic anxieties of a risk averse culture in keeping with the title, only to find a much more wide ranging and dense sociological account of transformations in work, relationships, class structure and politics. Indeed, within his home discipline of Sociology, reception to his work has been mixed and critiques are well established.

Yet, outside of risk studies, Beck’s work remains unfamiliar to many scholars in the social sciences. Readers of risk research journals will be familiar with the frequency with which Beck’s thesis is routinely cited in articles. Using Google’s NGram viewer – which maps trends in book citations over time – a consistently high and rising rate of references can be observed from 1987 into the new millennium. This represents an unprecedented volume of sales for a non-textbook work of social science (see Lash and Wynne Citation1992: 1).

Within five years of being published in 1986 in Germany, Ulrich Beck’s Risikogesellschaft – later translated in English as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity ( Citation 1992) – sold some 60,000 copies.

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