Anthony Giddens

Hello.

My name is Matt Dawson, and I'm a lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow.

And this, of course,

is going to be on Anthony Giddens and the third Way in his first section,

I'm going to tell you a bit about Anthony Giddens as a person and who the

context in which he came from and how his work feeds into the third way.

So Anthony Giddens is an English sociologist who was born in 1938 and he did.

Sociology went quite a marginal subjects in the UK He studied alternative

at the University of Whole and then the Land School of Economics,

which I'll talk about a bit more later on

and then taught at the University of Leicester, which was quite early.

A very prominent sociology department in the U. K.

He's now Baron Giddens of Southgate,

in the London borough of Enfield and sits in the House of Lords and again later on,

I'll talk about the significance of his being in the House of Lords.

So when Biden started his academic work, he did some very small scale studies.

His first work was on student halls of residences.

He ended some work in sociology of suicide and sociology sport.

But the first book that we should concern ourselves with for

the purpose of this lecture is a book published in 1971.

Entitled Capitalism and Modern Social Theory,

this book has often been seen as quite central,

informing what's sometimes called the Holy trinity of

the founding fathers of sociology of Mark's,

Dirk I'm and Veber.

But what's significant for our discussion here is that

what Giddens discusses these writers is particularly interesting,

their political ends he's particularly interested in seeing.

What can we take from these writers to understand the politics of the day?

And in particular,

how can we understand the changing nature of capitalism for contemporary

society and the form of politics that comes out as well?

So this is something that runs in two games. His work on the Third Way.

He was also a sociologist of class.

He published a book in 1973 called The Class Structures of the Advanced Societies.

We try to move somewhat away from a Marxist interpretation of class,

but the fact that with the emphasis on a conflict between the protesters

and the bourgeoisie and combine this with some barbarian notions of class,

including questions of status and labour market and so on.

From here,

Giddens in the early eighties started developing work for which had become known,

particularly in sociology, on the theory of what was called structure ation.

This fear of structural Asian was attempt

to combine two key sociological concepts.

Concepts of structure and the concept of agency.

So when sociologists talk about structure,

we're talking about the things that exist out there in the world,

which encourage us or force us to act.

In particular ways we're talking about norms are customs, institutions,

laws and so on the top down forces that encourage us to act in particular ways.

When we talk about agency,

we mean the fact that individuals can make

choices in social reproduction of society and get reproduced

individuals actively choosing certain outcomes and not others.

And Givens was very eager to combine these two elements.

But where Givens turns his focus to politics is in a

book published in 1981 called the

Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism.

So it's the title of this book gives away, This is gins,

attempts to talk about the nature of Marxism for the late 20th

century and what key elements have been maintained in Marxism significantly,

this book was supposed to be part of a two part series.

The second book was to be called Between Capitalism and Socialism,

and that book was to discuss how the capitalist societies

such as the UK in which gives of writing,

could move to socialist societies.

That book never appeared because Gin's work took a

different turn as we're going to talk about.

So in a contemporary critique of historical materialism, Giddens,

like many Socialist writers and Social Democratic writers before him,

turns to marks,

and it turned to Mark's. Gideon's wants to change the way we understand news.

Karl Marx's work.

He wants to reject the notion of Marks the historical writer,

so he wants to reject the notion that somehow Marks is someone who reveals some

laws of history or a certain path in which class is central to the discussion.

But he also wants to remove the focus on Marks is a political writer.

He wants to remove the focus on marks as someone who

is telling us how things should go in the future,

predicting a certain path of action,

predicting a certain technology or technology to history,

either belief that some events will naturally follow one another,

instead reflecting one of the things I spoke about earlier.

Giddens is particularly interested in talking about how Marks tell us about the

nature of capitalism in the current day and how capitalism shapes politics.

And one of the key things that

comes out the contemporary critique of historical materialism

is Guinness's critique of what he sees

as Marxist tendency to view individuals as dupes

to use his phrase to view individuals as people who are simply acting in line

with their class position or acting in line with the pressures in which they live.

Givens is very critical of this and argues that when

it comes to politics and political choices and political action,

people have to be reflexive considering what acts and they should do not

simply acting in line with something like class politics or economic interest.

As we'll see, this is central to what gives her say about the third way.

Following the publication of this book,

get instances focused to a larger macro social level.

In 1991 it publishes a book called Modernity and Self Identity.

in this book, Guinness is interesting. How modernity.

The notion of what we categorises modern societies in the West

focus on capitalism or state socialist societies on forms of democracy,

nation states, rationality and so on.

How that has changed in the eighties and nineties.

And he argues that one of the ways it's change is concerned our sense of identity,

our sense of who we are

that we now increasingly creates and reflect upon and

change our identity as part of our daily activities

rather than And here we see an overlap provide, just mentioned in his earlier work,

simply accepting notions of identity based around tradition or class or gender.

Instead, these are things that we can reflect upon and consider and change.

This also continues into a book published in 1992.

Transformation of Intimacy where give this is interesting,

how this changes our romantic relationships

and argues that we now no longer accept traditional ways of having relationships,

notions of marriage and inequalities within marriage, forms of power, et cetera.

When people get married so on. Instead of these active choices people make.

And then, a couple years later,

in 1990 for Giddens publishes a book called Beyond Left and Right,

which is where the discussion of the third way and gins broader politics comes in,

and I'll discuss beyond left and right and more depth in a minute.

But before then, I want to turn to the next section and try to, uh,

put Giddens in this context of the development of socialism, social democracy,

Britain.