There is little debate, particularly clear, ‘no bullshit’ debate within the risk and regulation community, much as there is a lack elsewhere within academia. Without it, much goes unclarifed and arguments aren't tested and pushed to their limits, which is generally where they need to go. On these grounds alone I would welcome the different approaches to European/American precaution set out by Vogel and Wiener. But there are more positive things to say about these competing representations, irrespective of which one prefers. This is a discussion rich in empirical detail but that goes beyond individual issues towards systemic patterns, relating the data to wider themes and an overall framework. What's more, it concerns a matter of real contemporary significance and interest that citizens generally – at least those of America and Europe – should know about, and even have a view upon. And it's genuinely interesting – irrespective of any engagement with the academic study of risk and regulation.

“And remember you’re in France: The customer is always wrong!”

Many years ago, there was intense debate about what the Precautionary Principle (“PP”) is, or is not. More recently, as the battle lines in that debate have ossified, academic attention seems to have shifted to a focus on the somewhat more subtle question of how the term PP, whatever it may mean, is used by different actors in different contexts. David Vogel’s recent book, The Politics of Precaution: Regulating the Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States (2012) (hereafter “Politics”), is a good recent example of such commentary. Vogel's approach recognizes the diversity of relevant developments, he seeks to impose a coherent narrative framework on those developments.

Reality is complex, and often does not lend itself to generalization or simplifying explanations. Yet at the same time, explaining reality often requires the shaping of notions and concepts of it through generalization and the reduction of complexity. This tension between complexity and particularity on the one hand and generalization and the search for abstracting explanatory patterns on the other is beautifully illustrated by two recently released publications on precaution and risk regulation in the United States and Europe, namely “The Politics of Precaution” by David Vogel1 and “The Reality of Precaution” edited by Jonathan Wiener, Michael Rogers, James Hammitt, and Peter Sand.

Both books together can be seen as the latest significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of the precautionary principle in risk regulation in a comparative EU-US perspective. Both contributions are significant in that they consolidate the trend towards an empirically informed analysis of the actual practice of the application of precaution in risk regulation.

Two recently published volumes on the concept of precaution as it is variously understood and applied across the United States and in Europe make for a fascinating comparative analysis. They also respectively offer some undoubted and invaluable insights into the subject. Sadly neither really addresses how precaution came of age or why.