Giddens, Anthony 1938-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anthony Giddens was educated as a sociologist at Hull University and the London School of Economics (LSE). He held a lectureship at Leicester University before being appointed lecturer and subsequently professor of sociology in the University of Cambridge. In 1996 he left Cambridge to become director of the LSE.

Giddens was certain at the end of the 1970s that nineteenth-century thought, on certain themes of which sociology had tended to remain focused, was an inadequate basis on which to proceed. In particular, Talcott Parsons’s (1902–1979) theory of the mid-twentieth century, supposedly resolving the main questions associated with these themes, had degenerated into an objectivistic, teleological framework in which the original “action” element had been lost, whilst his “interpretivist” opponents, while dealing with action and interaction, were unable to conceptualize “structure” in a satisfactory way. For Giddens, readdressing these issues in The Constitution of Society (1984), agency and structure are not merely mutually implicated in the sense that “structure” involves agents acting and acting is inconceivable apart from “conditions” and unintended consequences, they are the same. They merge in “practice.” Structure is virtual. It exists only in doing, moment by moment. This virtual “rules and resources” is “instantiated” and simultaneously reproduced in the action it “recursively” permits, as actors draw upon it to act, their concrete actions making up “social systems.” For critics of this, such as Margaret Archer (1990) and Nicos Mouzelis, there are certain important advantages to be gained from retaining the dualism of structure and agency, and not conflating them, and this need not mean returning to a sterile opposition between objectivism on the one hand and subjectivism on the other: Agency and structure should be seen as interrelated, but also as different kinds of things. This is only the most fundamental of the arguments critical of Giddens’s work in all its aspects.

“Reflexivity” is at the core of Giddens’s structuration theory, appearing in the shape of the self-monitoring actor, taken over and adapted from radical subjectivism. Agents’ knowledge of the mechanism of system reproduction, used by them to control this reproduction, influences substantially the causal feedback loops effecting system reproduction. In The Consequences of Modernity (1990) this reflexivity moves into a more prominent position in Giddens’s thinking than it had previously held; he sees it as being at the heart of what he began to call “late” or “radicalized” modernity. For it was reflexivity, both of the actor and of the social institution, that was becoming stepped up as tradition retreated more than in the “modern” past in the face of social relations that were increasingly “stretched” globally and lifted out of communal and face-to-face settings. (“Distanciation” or “stretching” of social relations in both time and space to form ever more extensive social systems was central to structuration theory.) In this phase of his development Giddens returned to the sociological analysis of modernity, the point from which he professed to have started out, resuming the interpretation of modern society that had been begun with the critique of historical materialism in A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol. 1 (1981), and continued with his analysis of the nation-state in The Nation-State and Violence (1985). The latest phase has seen Giddens turning to politics.

Giddens became convinced in the 1990s that the ideological positions of the “first” modernity had become frozen and increasingly out of touch with the current detraditionalized, increasingly globalized social reality of the emerging “late” or “reflexive” modernity. The Left had become conservative in their clinging to the welfare state (the product of a now passed, post-war class compromise or social settlement) whereas neoliberal celebrants of the market were caught in the growing contradiction of advocating the advance of forces that undermined moral coherence, which they as conservatives also espoused. Giddens urged in Beyond Left and Right (1994) a “Third Way” between Left and Right. This was, for some, an imprecise set of recommendations attached to a vague idea. But Giddens did specify the need for negotiation in personal life and for a politics outside of the old structures: a “life politics” and a “generative politics,” as he called them, by means of which people could seize hold of their own lives, taking advantage of the opportunities created by globalization and the retreat of the nation-state, recasting them themselves in a social environment located always at some point between “trust” (security) and “risk” (perceived danger). Basic trust is for Giddens an essential part of personality development, but now more than ever it must be “worked for” in intimate relationships; it can no longer be as taken for granted as it once was, and, moreover, extensive locality-transcending social relations simultaneously require and place in jeopardy, through its very integralness, trust—the opposite of which is risk. Giddens’s analysis of reflexive modernization was the key to the Third Way in ways spelled out in detail in The Third Way (1998)—for example, reflexivity in personal relations could form the basis for democratic renewal from the grassroots “upwards,” and reaching beyond the nation-state, and was central to the “life politics” that Giddens saw taking shape around him in a radicalized modernity, where the global and the local interpenetrate, and with new social movements displacing the old institutionalized parties and historic ideologies of an earlier industrial period.

Giddens’s action recommendations are locatable in his four institutional orders of modernity (industrialism, capitalism, administration-surveillance, and the military), but their principles could also be related, at least schematically, to the “rules” (signification and legitimation) and allocative and authoritative “resources” (domination) of his 1984 structuration schema. His influence on sociologists worldwide has been enormous, as is attested by the number of citations of his numerous works both scholarly and popular, the latter affecting parties and governments of a Third Way complexion. It is a measure of their author’s distinction that the issues they raise continue to be debated around the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archer, Margaret S. 1990. Human Agency and Social Structure: A Critique of Giddens. In Anthony Giddens: Consensus and Controversy, eds. Jon Clarke, Celia Modgil, and Sohan Modgil, 73–85. Basingstoke, U.K.: Falmer Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Ian Varcoe