ABSTRACT
Giddens would not deny that Marx was very important in the development of ‘social science’, and his instincts seem to be the nice-to-other-people ones which can be found at the theoretical heart of ‘the left’. But he is frustrated at the left/right divide in social analysis, and these days is identified as one of the architects of the ‘third way’, which Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder are supposedly interested in – although Giddens’s idea of it seems to be more original and complex than Blair’s mix of left and right traditions (see Giddens’s The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998), The Third Way and its Critics (2000)).
