Giddens, Anthony (1938-)

Anthony Giddens is one of the most influential social theorists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and the inventor and most prominent proponent of the theory of structuration. He was also a leading figure in British “third-way” politics in the 1990s. He has published at least 35 books, which have been translated into 30 languages, and more than 200 articles. Within human geography, he played a key role in debates about the “new regional geography,” the emergence of critical human geography, and theoretical developments in European social geography.

Giddens was born in Edmonton, a working-class area in northeast London. From the mid 1950s onward, he studied, at the University of Hull, Yorkshire, philosophy and sociology under Peter Worsley, an active member of the Socialist Society. He completed his master's degree from the London School of Economics, where noted theorists such as Karl Popper, Ernest Gellner, Peter Winch, and Ralf Dahrendorf were lecturing at the time. Their theoretical debates inspired Giddens's interest in social theory, as unveiled in his first book Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber in 1971. He was appointed as a lecturer at Leicester University, where he worked with Norbert Elias and Iliya Neustadt, and he spent several terms at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) and at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1969, he was appointed as a lecturer in sociology at Cambridge University, where he also received his PhD from King's College, and he cofounded Polity Press in 1985. He was promoted to a full professorship of social and political theory in 1987. Ten years later, Giddens was elected director of the London School of Economics. In June 2003, he was given a lifetime peerage in the House of Lords.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Giddens developed the theory of structuration, which elaborates on classic social theory. Giddens argued that Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber were all equally important founding figures of modern sociology. These three scientists shared more [Page 1278]similarities than was usually claimed. They all dealt with the emergence of modern society under the influence of industrialism and Western capitalism. Each of them presents specific analytical foci for the study of modern societies. As these foci are rooted in the 19th century, they need critical elaboration if social theory is to keep its relevance for the analysis of late modern societies. This is the starting point of Giddens's approach, which incorporates three main lines of argument: (1) an ontology of late modern societies, (2) the elaboration of an adequate social theory of late modern societies, and (3) a theory-based intervention in politics as a “third way” between capitalism and communism for the renewal of social democracy.

Giddens's ontology of contemporary societies reaches the conclusion that social reality changed so dramatically during the 20th century that none of the theories of the classics of social thought can continue to grasp it in a satisfying manner. The two most important dimensions of transformation are the shift from the temporal and spatial embeddedness of traditional societies to the disembeddedness of posttraditional or late modern societies and, based on the processes of disembeddedness, the ongoing process of subjectivation/individuation, implying most of all a radical transformation of intimacy and emancipatory politics. The elaboration of structuration theory, quite different from those of Pierre Bourdieu or Roy Bhaskar, takes the new socio-ontological conditions of late modern societies explicitly into account. Giddens's approach redefines the relations between agency, structure, and social system. In doing so, he draws attention to the duality of social structures, in other words, to the fact that social structures are constituted by human agency while at the same time they are a medium of social agency, enabling as well as constraining it. Based on this constitutive conceptual frame, structuration theory suggests investigating societies first of all in terms of agency and institutionalized practice and not in terms of structural categories. Accordingly, processes of structuration, that is, the interrelations of agency and (enabling/constraining) structures, should form the center of social research, not simply the analysis of structure.

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