You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course.
Anthony Giddens
- About
- Transcript
- Cite
Political Ideas – Giddens and the Third Way
In this course, Dr Matt Dawson (Glasgow University) explores the political ideas of Anthony Giddens. We begin with some context on the life and works of Anthony Giddens, before moving on in the second lecture to explore the history of socialism and social democracy in Britain. This offers useful context for the eventual advent of Tony Blair and the beginning of New Labour and the ‘Third Way’. In the third lecture, we outline the key ideas of Giddens’s 1994 work ‘Beyond Left and Right’, in particular his critique of the contemporary left, before exploring in the fourth lecture Giddens’s 1998 work ‘The Third Way’. We focus on the key policies Giddens advocates for in this work, before moving on in the fifth lecture to analyse the extent to which the policies of New Labour reflected Giddens’s notion of the Third Way. We round off in the sixth lecture with some criticisms of the Third Way and a few closing comments on its legacy.
Anthony Giddens
In this module, we give context to the life and works of Anthony Giddens, focusing in particular on: (i) his background as a sociologist; (ii) his academic works throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s; (iii) his theory of structuration and critique of Marxist historical materialism; (iv) his ideas on modernity and identity.
Hello.
00:00:05My name is Matt Dawson, and I'm a lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow.
00:00:06And this, of course,
00:00:10is going to be on Anthony Giddens and the third Way in his first section,
00:00:10I'm going to tell you a bit about Anthony Giddens as a person and who the
00:00:13context in which he came from and how his work feeds into the third way.
00:00:17So Anthony Giddens is an English sociologist who was born in 1938 and he did.
00:00:20Sociology went quite a marginal subjects in the UK He studied alternative
00:00:25at the University of Whole and then the Land School of Economics,
00:00:29which I'll talk about a bit more later on
00:00:32and then taught at the University of Leicester, which was quite early.
00:00:34A very prominent sociology department in the U. K.
00:00:37He's now Baron Giddens of Southgate,
00:00:39in the London borough of Enfield and sits in the House of Lords and again later on,
00:00:42I'll talk about the significance of his being in the House of Lords.
00:00:46So when Biden started his academic work, he did some very small scale studies.
00:00:49His first work was on student halls of residences.
00:00:54He ended some work in sociology of suicide and sociology sport.
00:00:57But the first book that we should concern ourselves with for
00:01:01the purpose of this lecture is a book published in 1971.
00:01:03Entitled Capitalism and Modern Social Theory,
00:01:06this book has often been seen as quite central,
00:01:09informing what's sometimes called the Holy trinity of
00:01:11the founding fathers of sociology of Mark's,
00:01:14Dirk I'm and Veber.
00:01:16But what's significant for our discussion here is that
00:01:18what Giddens discusses these writers is particularly interesting,
00:01:21their political ends he's particularly interested in seeing.
00:01:24What can we take from these writers to understand the politics of the day?
00:01:26And in particular,
00:01:31how can we understand the changing nature of capitalism for contemporary
00:01:32society and the form of politics that comes out as well?
00:01:36So this is something that runs in two games. His work on the Third Way.
00:01:39He was also a sociologist of class.
00:01:43He published a book in 1973 called The Class Structures of the Advanced Societies.
00:01:44We try to move somewhat away from a Marxist interpretation of class,
00:01:49but the fact that with the emphasis on a conflict between the protesters
00:01:54and the bourgeoisie and combine this with some barbarian notions of class,
00:01:58including questions of status and labour market and so on.
00:02:02From here,
00:02:08Giddens in the early eighties started developing work for which had become known,
00:02:08particularly in sociology, on the theory of what was called structure ation.
00:02:12This fear of structural Asian was attempt
00:02:16to combine two key sociological concepts.
00:02:18Concepts of structure and the concept of agency.
00:02:20So when sociologists talk about structure,
00:02:23we're talking about the things that exist out there in the world,
00:02:25which encourage us or force us to act.
00:02:28In particular ways we're talking about norms are customs, institutions,
00:02:31laws and so on the top down forces that encourage us to act in particular ways.
00:02:35When we talk about agency,
00:02:40we mean the fact that individuals can make
00:02:42choices in social reproduction of society and get reproduced
00:02:44individuals actively choosing certain outcomes and not others.
00:02:47And Givens was very eager to combine these two elements.
00:02:52But where Givens turns his focus to politics is in a
00:02:55book published in 1981 called the
00:02:59Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism.
00:03:01So it's the title of this book gives away, This is gins,
00:03:04attempts to talk about the nature of Marxism for the late 20th
00:03:07century and what key elements have been maintained in Marxism significantly,
00:03:11this book was supposed to be part of a two part series.
00:03:16The second book was to be called Between Capitalism and Socialism,
00:03:19and that book was to discuss how the capitalist societies
00:03:23such as the UK in which gives of writing,
00:03:26could move to socialist societies.
00:03:28That book never appeared because Gin's work took a
00:03:31different turn as we're going to talk about.
00:03:33So in a contemporary critique of historical materialism, Giddens,
00:03:36like many Socialist writers and Social Democratic writers before him,
00:03:40turns to marks,
00:03:45and it turned to Mark's. Gideon's wants to change the way we understand news.
00:03:46Karl Marx's work.
00:03:51He wants to reject the notion of Marks the historical writer,
00:03:52so he wants to reject the notion that somehow Marks is someone who reveals some
00:03:55laws of history or a certain path in which class is central to the discussion.
00:03:59But he also wants to remove the focus on Marks is a political writer.
00:04:05He wants to remove the focus on marks as someone who
00:04:08is telling us how things should go in the future,
00:04:11predicting a certain path of action,
00:04:13predicting a certain technology or technology to history,
00:04:16either belief that some events will naturally follow one another,
00:04:19instead reflecting one of the things I spoke about earlier.
00:04:23Giddens is particularly interested in talking about how Marks tell us about the
00:04:27nature of capitalism in the current day and how capitalism shapes politics.
00:04:30And one of the key things that
00:04:35comes out the contemporary critique of historical materialism
00:04:36is Guinness's critique of what he sees
00:04:40as Marxist tendency to view individuals as dupes
00:04:42to use his phrase to view individuals as people who are simply acting in line
00:04:46with their class position or acting in line with the pressures in which they live.
00:04:52Givens is very critical of this and argues that when
00:04:57it comes to politics and political choices and political action,
00:04:59people have to be reflexive considering what acts and they should do not
00:05:02simply acting in line with something like class politics or economic interest.
00:05:07As we'll see, this is central to what gives her say about the third way.
00:05:12Following the publication of this book,
00:05:16get instances focused to a larger macro social level.
00:05:18In 1991 it publishes a book called Modernity and Self Identity.
00:05:23in this book, Guinness is interesting. How modernity.
00:05:27The notion of what we categorises modern societies in the West
00:05:30focus on capitalism or state socialist societies on forms of democracy,
00:05:34nation states, rationality and so on.
00:05:40How that has changed in the eighties and nineties.
00:05:42And he argues that one of the ways it's change is concerned our sense of identity,
00:05:46our sense of who we are
00:05:50that we now increasingly creates and reflect upon and
00:05:52change our identity as part of our daily activities
00:05:55rather than And here we see an overlap provide, just mentioned in his earlier work,
00:05:58simply accepting notions of identity based around tradition or class or gender.
00:06:02Instead, these are things that we can reflect upon and consider and change.
00:06:07This also continues into a book published in 1992.
00:06:11Transformation of Intimacy where give this is interesting,
00:06:14how this changes our romantic relationships
00:06:18and argues that we now no longer accept traditional ways of having relationships,
00:06:20notions of marriage and inequalities within marriage, forms of power, et cetera.
00:06:25When people get married so on. Instead of these active choices people make.
00:06:29And then, a couple years later,
00:06:35in 1990 for Giddens publishes a book called Beyond Left and Right,
00:06:36which is where the discussion of the third way and gins broader politics comes in,
00:06:40and I'll discuss beyond left and right and more depth in a minute.
00:06:45But before then, I want to turn to the next section and try to, uh,
00:06:48put Giddens in this context of the development of socialism, social democracy,
00:06:52Britain.
00:06:56
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Dawson, M. (2022, March 29). Political Ideas – Giddens and the Third Way - Anthony Giddens [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/political-philosophy-giddens-and-the-third-way/british-socialism-and-social-democracy
MLA style
Dawson, M. "Political Ideas – Giddens and the Third Way – Anthony Giddens." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 29 Mar 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/political-philosophy-giddens-and-the-third-way/british-socialism-and-social-democracy