Giddens, Anthony

Anthony Giddens (b. 1938), internationally famous British sociologist, innovative publisher, public intellectual, and, until recently, Director of the London School of Economics, has, since the early 1970s, been the author of a remarkable succession of seminal contributions to social theory. In founding the tradition of structuration theory during the 1970s, and developing it in the 1980s, he provided an original and systematic means to combine the central sociological concepts of structure and agency. Structuration theory synthesises a rich array of philosophical and sociological approaches to create a theory of social life that places socially situated practices at its core in order to avoid an exaggeration of either the subjectivism of an overly agency-based approach or the objectivism of an overly structure-based approach. Giddens used this theory, inter alia, to challenge a whole series of central axioms inherited from the sociological classics and beyond, from Marx and Durkheim to Schütz, Parsons, Merton, Althusser, and Foucault. In the same year, 1985, as he became the first head of the new faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University, Giddens joined with his colleagues John B. Thompson and David Held to found Polity Press, which was to become one of the world's leading social science publishers. Closely involved with commissioning and editing, Giddens was instrumental in making many of the continental European and American sources for his own philosophical and theoretical syntheses accessible to a much wider audience than hitherto. His extensive historical sociology, also developed during the late 1970s and 1980s, famously challenged core ingredients of historical materialism and argued for a distinctively pluralistic approach to causation. Four major works on late modernity and its politics written in the 1990s, beginning with The Consequences of Modernity, dissected and analysed the major institutional forces and life experiences of what he calls the “runaway world,” highlighting the roles of institutional reflexivity, risk, and trust within this nexus. Most lately, his role as a public intellectual has come to the fore with a series of popularly targeted publications that have been translated into countless languages and whose influence has been felt in the corridors of power from London and Washington to Brasilia and Seoul. The first of these, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, began life as an attempt to give logical rigour to a series of seminars he took part in during the late 1990s that included Tony Blair, the Clintons, and members of the British and American cabinets. In 1999, he was invited to present the BBC's prestigious Reith Lectures. The focus was on globalization, and three of the five broadcasts were delivered outside London, from Delhi, Hong Kong, and Washington, with simultaneous presentation and debate on the Internet.