Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity

by Anthony Giddens, Chris Pierson

Anthony Giddens has been described as “the most important English social philosopher of our time.” Over 25 years, with a dazzling series of books that attest to his unrelenting productivity, he has established himself as today’s most widely read and widely cited social theorist. In recent years, his writings have become more explicitly political, and in 1996 he became Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. It is in this position that he has been accepted as the key intellectual figure of Tony Blair’s New Labour government.
Giddens’s interests have always been remarkably diverse, ranging from Continental philosophy to self-help therapy, and his work builds on a critical engagement with an extraordinary array of texts from within and beyond the canon of the social sciences. His ideas have profoundly influenced the writing and teaching of the central ideas of the rapidly changing study of modernity.
These seven extended interviews with Christopher Pierson, conducted shortly after Giddens’s arrival at the LSE, seek to cover the full range of his thought since the early 1970’s, beginning with his engagement with the makers of “classical” sociology and concluding with his thoughts on the nature of world politics under what Giddens terms “reflexive modernity.” The style of the interviews is conversational, and Giddens sets forth his ideas with his customary clarity and directness.
In addition to the interviews, four short pieces at the end of the book give examples of Giddens’s recent thought, treating Tony Blair’s political philosophy, the risk society concept in the contextof British politics, and the dangers of chemical contamination. The volume concludes with a conversation between Giddens and European financier and philanthropist George Soros.

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1998

About the author

Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born 18 January 1938) is a British sociologist who is renowned for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, 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-referenced author of books in the humanities.

Three notable stages can be identified in his academic life. 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 New Rules of Sociological Method (1976). 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 Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984), brought him international fame on the sociological arena.

The most recent stage concerns modernity, globalization 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"[3] third way in politics, visible in the Consequence of Modernity (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), Beyond Left and Right (1994) and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998). Giddens' ambition is both to recast social theory and to re-examine our understanding of the development and trajectory of modernity.

Currently Giddens serves as Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics.

Reviews

[Yukinosita Yukino · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best intro to Giddens' theories and him as a smart but glibly person