ABSTRACT
Giddens engages with classical social theorists, most notably Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. His aim, like that of the great trio, is to understand the cluster of changes which we call the emergence of ‘modernity’ from around the time of the mid-seventeenth century. Sociology’s origin and purpose were to account for this break with ‘traditional’ societies which was marked by the development of factory production, bureaucratisation, urbanisation, the growth of a scientific ethos, new ways of seeing nature – the set of institutional and attitudinal changes which we call ‘modernity’.
