EN
Ulrich Beck is a famous German sociologist who has examined the concepts of risk society and the second modernity. Both terms were described by Beck as opposite to industrial society and class society. Recently, Dean Curran has attempted to overcome this opposition, and reconcile hermeneutics of classes and the risk society. This article examines the exchange of arguments between Ulrich Beck and Dean Curran and treats this exchange as a pretext to systematically identify those parts of the theory of risk society that cannot be reconciled with class theory. We examine how Marxian and Weberian theories of classes can effectively explain the phenomenon of second modernity.