ABSTRACT
This is not a book about Giddens and his work in the conventional sense of introducing the reader to the major tenets of structuration theory or the other aspects of Giddens’s thought. Such aims are achieved admirably in books written by Ian Craib (1992), Ira Cohen (1989), and others whose works are reviewed briefly in chapter 2. Rather, this book uses the work of Anthony Giddens as a vehicle to engage in a broad discussion of modernity, postmodernity, culture, and the relevance of classical social theory for contemporary times. In sum, I treat Giddens’s work as representative of what I consider to be wrong with modern sociology. Some readers might expect my criticisms to come from a sympathetic reading, for example that Giddens’s ambiguities and contradictions would be noted, but that his statements would then be accorded the best reasonable interpretation and only problems that still remain be seriously criticized. But mine is not a sympathetic reading. Instead, it is polemical, but it is not aimed at Giddens personally as much as at Giddens as representative of tendencies that I find objectionable in modern sociology. Let me note that good examples of the sort of work I offer here are to be found in David Riesman’s Thorstein Veblen (1995), Douglas Kellner’s Jean Baudrillard (1989), and C.Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination (1959), books that range far beyond Veblen, Baudrillard, and Parsons in their respective discussions. The authors of these polemics admit that they are not overly fond of the vehicles they use for their discussions (Veblen, Baudrillard, Parsons), and I hereby confess that I am not overly fond of Giddens’s work either. Nevertheless, I hope to fill a needed gap in the existing literature on Giddens as well as these other topics by:
1 focusing on theorists whom and theories that Giddens and other contemporary theorists tend to neglect, such as the works of David Riesman, Wilhelm Wundt, Georg Simmel, and Thorstein Veblen;
2 examining these neglected theories and theorists in a cultural context, namely, taking into account the people, habits of the heart (popularized admirably by Bellah et al. 1985), traditions, customs, and intellectual currents that surrounded them;
3 juxtaposing Giddens’s concept of “high modernity” with Jean Baudrillard’s writings on postmodernity;
4 challenging Giddens’s assumption that classical social theory must be overhauled radically in order to be useful;
5 challenging Giddens’s claims that the ghost of Auguste Comte animated the defunct version of sociology that he hopes to revivify;
6 challenging Giddens’s assumption that sociology is the study of modern Western societies only-an assumption that seems to fairly represent the discipline of sociology today;
7 exposing the many contradictions in Giddens’s writings concerning the nation-state, the creation of synthetic traditions, and human agency.
