Anthony Giddens > Quotes

“When the image of Nelson Mandela may be more familiar to us than the face of our next-door neighbour, something has changed in the nature of our everyday experience.”
― Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives

“A person's identity is not to be found in behavior...but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going”
― Anthony Giddens

“All so-called ‘quantitative’ data, when scrutinized, turn out to be composites of ‘qualitative’ – i.e., contextually located and indexical – interpretations produced by situated researchers, coders, government officials and others. The”
― Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration

“sociological research is part of a continuous ‘two-way’ process between sociologists and the subjects they study.”
― Anthony Giddens, Essential Concepts in Sociology

“The formulation of critical theory is not an option; theories and findings in the social sciences are likely to have practical (and political) consequences regardless of whether or not the sociological observer or policy-maker decides that they can be ‘applied’ to a given practical issue.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration

“Capitalism has disappeared as an object of study, just when it has removed any alternative to itself.”
― Anthony Giddens

“Suppose, by way of illustration, we isolate a relation between technological change and patterns of managerial organization in business firms. The expanding use of microchip technology, let us say, might be shown to be associated with a partial dissolution of more rigid forms of hierarchical authority. The ‘social force’ involved here is not like a force of nature. Causal generalizations in the social sciences always presume a typical ‘mix’ of intended and unintended consequence of action, on the basis of the rationalization of conduct, whether ‘carried’ on the level of discursive or of practical consciousness. Technological change is not something that occurs independently of the uses to which agents put technology, the characteristic modes of innovation, etc. It”
― Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration

“Theories in the natural sciences which have been replaced by others which do the same job better are of no interest to the current practice of science. This cannot be the case where those theories have helped to constitute what they interpret or explicate. The”
― Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration

“No one knows whether at the global level a framework of democratic institutions will develop, or whether alternatively world politics will slide into a destructiveness that might threaten the entire planet. Nobody knows if sexual relationships will become a wasteland of impermanent liaisons, marked by emotional antipathy as much as by love, and scarred by violence. There are good grounds for optimism in each case, but in a culture that has given up providentialism futures have to be worked for against a background of acknowledged risk.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Old Conservatism, at least in its more principled forms, is, as has been aptly said, the ‘other God that failed’ alongside Communism and radical socialism.4”
― Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics

“Dívky neusilují o sexuální svobodu - tu mají. Jejich problémem je, jak z ní udělat něco smysluplného tváří v tvář mužským postojům, zatížených minulostí...”
― Anthony Giddens

“Sexuality is a terrain of fundamental political struggle and also a medium of emancipation, just as the sexual radicals claimed. A non-repressive society ... would be one in which sexuality is increasingly freed from compulsiveness. Emancipation thus presumes autonomy of action in the context of the generalisation of plastic sexuality. It is separate from permissiveness in so far as it creates an ethics of personal life which makes possible a conjunction of happiness, love, and respect for others.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“La comunicación de los sentimientos, además, no es en sí ni por sí misma suficiente para la intimidad. En la medida en que tal comunicación está ligada con el narcisismo, se trata de una oferta de poder más que de una contribución al desarrollo del amor confluente.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“The reflexivity of the self, in conjunction with the influence of abstract systems, pervasively affects the body as well as psychic processes. The body is less and less an extrinsic ‘given’, functioning outside the internally referential systems of modernity, but becomes itself reflexively mobilized. What might appear as a
wholesale movement towards the narcissistic cultivation of bodily appearance is in fact an expression of a concern lying much
deeper actively to ‘construct’ and control the body.”
― Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age

“Může se zdát, že demokracie kvete jen na zvlášť úrodné půdě, která byla kultivována po dlouhá období. Může se zdát, že ve společnostech nebo oblastech, které nemají bohatou historii demokratické vlády, zapustila demokracie jen mělké kořeny a je snadno odstranitelná. Ale snad se to všechno mění. Snad bychom spíše než křehkou květinu, kterou lze snadno zadupat do země, měli v demokracii vidět houževnatou rostlinu, schopnou uchytit se i na zcela neúrodné zemi.”
― Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives

“Una adicción es una incapacidad de colonizar el futuro y, en cuanto tal, realiza una transgresión de las primeras preocupaciones con las que deben lidiar reflexivamente los individuos.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Sexual emancipation, I think, can be the medium of a wide-ranging emotional reorganisation of social life. The concrete meaning of emancipation in this context is not, however, as the sexual radicals proposed, a substantive set of psychic qualities or forms of behaviour. It is more effectively understood in a procedural way, as the possibility of the radical democratisation of the personal. Who says sexual emancipation, in my view, says sexual democracy. It is not only sexuality at stake here. The democratisation of personal life, as a potential, extends in a fundamental way to friendship relations and, crucially, to the relations of parents, children, and other kin.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“The ... conditions of democracy in the public sphere ... bear very directly upon the democratisation of personal life. Violent and abusive relationships are common in the sexual domain and between adults and children. Most such violence comes from men and is directed towards beings weaker than themselves. As an emancipatory ideal of democracy, the prohibition of violence is of basic importance. Coercive influences in relationships, however, obviously can take forms other than physical violence. Individuals may be prone, for example, to engage in emotional or verbal abuse of one another; marriage, so the saying goes, is a poor substitute for respect. Avoidance of emotional abuse is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the equalising of power in relationship; but the guiding principle is clearly respect for the independent views and personal traits of the other.”
― Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies

“Religion provides a feeling that life is ultimately meaningful. It does so by explaining coherently and compellingly what transcends or overshadows everyday life,
in ways that other aspects of culture (such as an educational system or a belief in democracy) cannot (Geertz,
1973; Wuthnow, 1988).”
― Anthony Giddens, Introduction to Sociology

“las personas no poseen una libertad total para pensar, decir o hacer lo que quieran, ya que hay límites en la capacidad de agencia humana.”
― Anthony Giddens, Conceptos esenciales de Sociología (El libro universitario - Manuales)