Anxiety in a Risk Society, Iain Wilkinson, Routledge, London, 2001, pp.  1-165.

Iain Wilkinson has set himself quite a challenge in writing this book. As a sociologist, his intention is to make the problem of anxiety a matter of sociological investigation. However, he questions whether the study of anxiety tests the limits of a sociological conceptualisation of the “interrelationship between public issues and the problems of private life” (p. 9). He wants to conduct his study through the prism of risk since “increasing numbers of sociologists have come to recognise the high anxieties of late twentieth-century society as being intimately connected with the extent to which we are becoming more ‘risk conscious’” (p. 5, Introduction). But there are different frameworks for conceptualising and explaining the perception of risk, he argues. Have we become culturally predisposed to express our anxieties in the language of risk? Or, is it through a new knowledge of the risks we face that our lives are conceived as having acquired a new quality of hazardous uncertainty? Either way, however, Wilkinson rightly suggests that for most sociologists anxiety is not seen as requiring any detailed study in its own right, for risk consciousness is regarded as either a cause or an expression of anxiety. It is as if anxiety itself is placed in the proverbial cybernetic black box, not in itself needing enquiry or explanation. I think this is a good way of formulating one of the central problems the book seeks to open up. The extent to which any light is shed on this, in the context of the framework within which the author approaches the subject, will be addressed later in the review.

In the first half of the book, Wilkinson focuses on the task of analysing the constituent aspects of anxiety and he deals in particular with studies that have sought to account for its social distribution. His focus in the earlier chapters is to find out how stress research can provide us with “sociologically ‘objective’ indicators of anxiety in contemporary societies”. In Chapter 2, he a