Anthony Giddens

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Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born 18 January 1938) is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most cited author of books in the humanities. He has academic appointments in approximately twenty different universities throughout the world and has received numerous honorary degrees.

His works are divided into four stages:

The first one involved outlining a new vision of what sociology is, presenting a theoretical and methodological understanding of that field based on a critical reinterpretation of the classics. His major publications of that era include Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) and The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1973).

In the second stage, Giddens developed the theory of structuration, an analysis of agency and structure in which primacy is granted to neither. His works of that period, such as New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984), brought him international fame on the sociological arena.

The third stage of Giddens's academic work was concerned with modernity, globalisation and politics, especially the impact of modernity on social and personal life. This stage is reflected by his critique of postmodernity and discussions of a new "utopian-realist" Third Way in politics which is visible in The Consequences of Modernity (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way (1998).

In the most recent stage, Giddens has turned his attention to a more concrete range of problems relevant to the evolution of world society, namely environmental issues, focusing especially upon debates about climate change in his book The Politics of Climate Change (2009); the role and nature of the European Union in Turbulent and Mighty Continent (2014); and in a series of lectures and speeches also the nature and consequences of the Digital Revolution.

Giddens served as Director of the London School of Economics from 1997 to 2003, where he is now Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology. He is a life fellow of King's College, Cambridge. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Giddens is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for sociology courses.

Biography

In A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Giddens concludes: is justified. In addition, The Third Way supplies a broad range of policy proposals aimed at what Giddens calls the "progressive centre-left" in British politics. According to Giddens: " overall aim of third way politics should be to help citizens pilot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalisation, transformations in personal life and our relationship to nature." Although close to New Labour in the United Kingdom, Giddens dissociated himself from many of the interpretations of the Third Way made in the sphere of day-to-day politics. For him, it was not a succumbing to neoliberalism or the dominance of capitalist markets. The point was to get beyond both market fundamentalism and traditional top-down socialism to make the values of the centre-left count in a globalising world. He argued that "the regulation of financial markets is the single most pressing issue in the world economy" and that "global commitment to free trade depends upon effective regulation rather than dispenses with the need for it".

In 1999, Giddens delivered the BBC Reith Lectures on the subject of runaway world, subsequently published as a book of that title. and the first to respond directly to e-mails that came in while he was speaking. The lectures were delivered in London, Washington, New Delhi and Hong Kong and responded to by local audiences. Giddens received the Asturias Prize for the social sciences in 2002. The award has been labelled the Spanish Nobel Prize, but it stretches well beyond the sphere of science. Other recipients of the prize that year included Woody Allen, the inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee and conductor Daniel Barenboim.

Outside consultancies

thumb|Giddens and [[Chelsea Clinton at the London School of Economics in 2001]]

On two visits to Libya in 2006 and 2007, organised by the Boston-based consultancy firm Monitor Group, Giddens met with Muammar Gaddafi. Giddens has declined to comment on the financial compensation he received. The Guardian reported in March 2011 that Libya's government engaged Monitor Group as advisor on matters of public relations. Monitor Group allegedly received 2 million pounds in return for undertaking a "cleansing campaign" to improve Libya's image. In a letter to Abdullah Senussi, a high-ranking Libyan official in July 2006, Monitor Group reported as follows:

<blockquote>We will create a network map to identify significant figures engaged or interested in Libya today. ... We will identify and encourage journalists, academics and contemporary thinkers who will have interest in publishing papers and articles on Libya. ... We are delighted that after a number of conversations, Lord Giddens has now accepted our invitation to visit Libya in July.

Giddens remarked of his meetings with Gaddafi as such: "You usually get about half an hour with a political leader". He also recalls the following: "My conversation lasts for more than three. Gaddafi is relaxed and clearly enjoys intellectual conversation. He likes the term 'third way' because his own political philosophy is a version of this idea. He makes many intelligent and perceptive points. I leave enlivened and encouraged".

Theory of reflexivity

Giddens introduces reflexivity and in information societies information gathering is considered as a routinised process for the greater protection of the nation. Information gathering is known as the concept of individuation. Individuality comes as a result of individuation as people are given more informed choices. The more information the government has about a person, the more entitlements are given to the citizens. The process of information gathering helps government to identify enemies of the state, singling out individuals that are suspected of plotting activities against the state. The advent of technology has brought national security to a completely new level. Historically, the military relied on armed force to deal with threats. With the development of ICT, biometric scans, language translation, real time programs and other related intelligent programs have made the identification of terrorist activities much easier compared to the past. The analysing of algorithm patterns in biometric databases have given government new leads. Data about citizens can be collected through identification and credential verification companies. Hence, surveillance and ICT goes hand-in-hand with information gathering. In other words, the collection of information is necessary as stringent safeguards for the protection of the nation, preventing it from imminent attacks.

Living in a high opportunity, high risk society

Giddens has vigorously pursued the theme of globalisation in recent years. He sees the growing interdependence of world society as driven not only by the increasing integration of the world economy, but above all by massive advances in communications. As he has noted when he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures just before the turn of the century, An increasingly interconnected and wired-up world offers many advantages and benefits, yet it carries new risks too, some themselves of global proportions. In the 21st century, work opportunity and risk combine as never before. Giddens refers to the emergence on a global level of a "high opportunity, high risk society". Both on the level of opportunity and risk we are in terrain human beings have never explored before. We do not know in advance what the balance is likely to be because many of the opportunities and risks are quite new as we cannot draw on past history to assess them.

Climate change is one of those new risks. No other civilisation before the advent of modern industrialism was able to intervene into nature to even a fraction of the extent to which we do on an everyday basis.

Climate change was referred to in several of Giddens's books from the mid-1990s onwards, but it was not discussed at length until the publication of his work The Politics of Climate Change in 2009. Giddens says climate change constitutes a fundamental threat to the future of industrial civilisation as it spreads across the globe. Given that is the case, he asks why are countries around the world doing so little to counter its advance. Many reasons are involved, but the prime one is the historical novelty of humanly induced climate change itself. No previous civilisation intervened into nature on a level remotely similar to that which we do on an everyday level today. We have no previous experience of dealing with such an issue and especially one of such global scope, or of the dangers it poses. Those dangers hence appear as abstract and located at some indefinite point in the future. Giddens's paradox consists of the following theorem. We are likely put off responding adequately to climate change until major catastrophes unequivocally connected to it occur, but by then by definition it would be too late, for we have no way of reversing the build-up of greenhouses gases that is driving the transformation of the world's climate. Some such gases would be in the atmosphere for centuries.

Within 'The Politics of Climate Change' Giddens places attention on global environmental conferences such as the 1997 Kyoto summit, whereby an agreement was drawn up so that developed countries would cut their emissions by an average of 5.2 per cent. The Kyoto protocol was to become a part of international law, and the developed countries who accounted for at least 55 per cent of total emissions from the industrial states, would have to sign up.

In his latest work, Giddens has returned to the subject of the European Union, discussed in 2007 in his book Europe in the Global Age and in a diversity of articles. In Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe?, he discusses the likely future of the European Union after the 2008 financial crisis. Giddens writes as a committed pro-European, but he accepts that fundamental reforms must be made if the European Union is to avoid stagnation or worse. The coming of the euro introduced economic federalism among the eurozone countries and therefore to the European Union as a whole. Some version of political federalism must follow, even if limited in nature. Reforms must confer qualities absent from much of the European Union's history, but which are now required for its future such as flexible and quick-acting leadership, coupled to the greater democratic involvement of citizens. However, he also emphasised that European Union "could still founder, even disintegrate, the result of a chain reaction of circumstances that member states were unable to control".

In recent years, while continuing to pursue some of the core themes of his earlier works he has become preoccupied with the impact of the Digital Revolution on world society and on everyday life. That revolution, he argues, must not be identified solely with the advent of the internet, extraordinary although that is. Rather, the Digital Revolution is a massive wave of change washing across the world, driven by the interrelation between the Internet, robotics and supercomputers. It is huge algorithmic power—available to the billions of people who already possess smartphones—that connects the other two.

Giddens sees the pace and global scope of such revolution as unprecedented in human history and we are probably only in its early stages. Many see the Digital Revolution as primarily producing endless diversity and as acting to dissolve pre-existing institutions and modes of life. Giddens emphasises that from its beginnings it has been bound up with power and large-scale structures too. It is deeply bound up with American global power and has physical form, depending as it does upon global satellite systems and systems, underground cables and concentrations of supercomputers. GPS has its origins in super-power rivalry between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union. The digital universe is also funded by mass advertising and expresses the dominance of large corporations in the world economy.

The Digital Revolution forms an important part of Giddens's recent preoccupation with the emergence of the high opportunity, high risk society. For example, the advent of such revolution promises fundamental advances in core areas of medicine. New threats and problems abound, both in our everyday lives and in the larger institutions of our societies. Scientists can communicate with one-another in a direct way across the world. The overlap of supercomputers and genetics means that genetic structures can be decoded instantaneously, promising huge advances in conquering major diseases. Medical practice is likely to be transformed through remote monitoring and other digital innovations. At the same time, the overlap of the Digital Revolution with criminality, violence and war is pervasive and dangerous. Military drones are just one example of the continuing involvement of the Digital Revolution with war.

Emerging developments in artificial intelligence look likely to propel these changes into a new phase of social transformation, whose outlines at present remain hazy, but which look certain to be quite profound. Supercomputers are becoming more and more powerful in terms of their capacity to handle immense amounts of data while quantum computers, with even greater processing capacity, loom on the horizon. At the same time, deep learning—artificial neural networks capable of innovative thinking—is fast advancing. A world-wide debate is going on about how far artificial intelligence can match, or even surpass, human intellectual capabilities. Artificial intelligence and geopolitics, Giddens says, are converging all over again "as the circle of change comes back to its point of origin". In the meantime, China is pouring resources into the further development of artificial intelligence and currently possesses the world's most advanced supercomputer.

Giddens was a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on artificial intelligence which reported in April 2018. The committee put forward a variety of suggested reforms to apply not only in the United Kingdom, but potentially much more widely as well. These should take place within a common ethical framework to guide intervention on the part of government and of the digital corporations themselves. The power of the digital mega-corporations must be curtailed and subjected to democratic governance, challenging and problematic though such an endeavour is. Artificial intelligence should be developed for the common good. It should follow principles of transparency and fairness and never be allocated the autonomous capability to harm human actors. The major nations and transnational agencies should work towards ensuring that such principles are incorporated into their own codes and practices and applied on a transnational level. The worry is that an artificial intelligence arms race would develop as countries jostle to take the lead both in artificial intelligence generally and in its application to weaponry of diverse sorts. In a much-publicised speech given in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin observed of advances in artificial intelligence that "whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world". If there is a jostling for advantage among the major powers, concerns of ethics and safety may fall by the wayside in the scramble for advantage, adding to the stresses and strains already visible in the international order.

Honours

Giddens was appointed to a life peerage on 16 June 2004 as Baron Giddens, of Southgate in the London Borough of Enfield He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In 1999, he was made a Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator by the Portuguese government.

Giddens received the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2002.

In June 2020 it was announced that Giddens had been awarded the Arne Naess Chair and Prize at the University of Oslo, Norway, in recognition of his contributions to the study of environmental issues and climate change. Previous holders of the chair include James Lovelock, David Sloan Wilson and Eva Joly.

He also holds over 15 honorary degrees from various universities, including recently honorary degrees from Jagiellonian University (2015), the University of South Australia (2016), Goldsmiths, University of London (2016) and Lingnan University (2017).

Select bibliography

Giddens is the author of over 34 books and 200 articles. This is a selection of some of the most important of his works:

Giddens, Anthony (1971) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1973) The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, Anthony (1976) Functionalism: apres la lutte, Social Research, 43, 325–366.
Giddens, Anthony (1976) New Rules of Sociological Method: a Positive Critique of interpretative Sociologies. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, Anthony (1977) Studies in Social and Political Theory. London: Hutchinson.
Giddens, Anthony (1978) Durkheim. London: Fontana Modern Masters.
Giddens, Anthony (1979) Central problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1981) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 1. Power, Property and the State. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1982) Sociology: A Brief but Critical Introduction. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1982) Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. London: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony; Mackenzie, Gavin (eds.) (1982) Social Class and the Division of Labour: Essays in Honour of Ilya Neustadt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1985) A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 2. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity.
Beck, Ulrich; Giddens, Anthony; Lash, Scott (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1994) Beyond Left and Right — the Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1995) Politics, Sociology and Social Theory: Encounters with Classical and Contemporary Social Thought. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1996) In Defence of Sociology. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1996) Durkheim on Politics and the State. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1998) The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (1999) Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile.
Hutton, Will; Giddens, Anthony (eds.) (2000) On The Edge: Living with Global Capitalism. London: Vintage.
Giddens, Anthony (2000) The Third Way and Its Critics. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (2000) Runaway World. London: Routledge.
Giddens, Anthony (ed.) (2001) The Global Third Way Debate. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (2002) Where Now for New Labour? Cambridge: Polity (publisher).
Giddens, Anthony (ed.) (2003) The Progressive Manifesto. New Ideas for the Centre-Left. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (ed.) (2005) The New Egalitarianism Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony; Sutton, Philip W. (2021) Sociology (9th Edition). Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (2007) Europe In The Global Age. Cambridge: Polity
Giddens, Anthony (2007) Over to You, Mr Brown - How Labour Can Win Again. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony (2009) The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity
Giddens, Anthony; Duneier, Mitchell; Appelbaum, Richard P.; Carr, Deborah (2009) Introduction to Sociology (Seventh Edition). Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, Anthony; Duneier, Mitchell; Appelbaum, Richard P.; Carr, Deborah (2011) Introduction to Sociology (Eighth Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Giddens, Anthony; Duneier, Mitchell; Appelbaum, Richard P.; Carr, Deborah (2013) Introduction to Sociology (Ninth Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Giddens, Anthony; Duneier, Mitchell; Appelbaum, Richard P.; Carr, Deborah (2016) Introduction to Sociology (Tenth Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Giddens, Anthony; Duneier, Mitchell; Appelbaum, Richard P.; Carr, Deborah (2018) Introduction to Sociology (Eleventh Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Giddens, Anthony; Duneier, Mitchell; Appelbaum, Richard P.; Carr, Deborah (2021) Introduction to Sociology (Twelfth Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

References

External links

Current LSE profile
Giddens archived LSE page
Social Democracy Observatory
Selection of Giddens quotes

Selected interviews

(1 May 2007).
BBC Interview with Giddens. 1999 BBC Reith Lectures interview with Giddens on the topic of "The Runaway World" and reflections on globalisation.
"The Second Globalization Debate: A Talk With Anthony Giddens". A video is also available.
Giddens in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show The Forum (audio). "On Climate Change" (audio).

Videos

"The Great Debate: What is radical politics today?". December 2008 discussion with Will Hutton and Jonathan Pugh.