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Risk as a collective experience and public issue has redefined the politics and structure of contemporary societies. But risk is also, and increasingly so, an object of calculation and scientific assessment. These two phenomena are in many ways inseparable, but have seldom been analysed jointly. By ignoring the rise of a science of risk analysis and the institutionalization of risk-analytic techniques in government, and emphasizing science’s loss of scientific authority, seminal theories of risk such as Beck’s Risk society even constitute them as paradoxical. Moving beyond the seeming contradiction between these two faces of contemporary societies — a risk society and a risk analysis society — the paper shows that the capacity to engage with the sociotechnical controversies that are typical of the former, is indeed a characteristic of the regulatory sciences that pertain to the latter.