ABSTRACT
We have seen in chapter 5 that with regard to political sociology, Giddens contradicts himself by promoting social order and a rigidly controlled nation-state at the same time that he writes about time-space distanciation and globalization. If one were to take his thoughts on communications and globalization seriously, and expected him to be consistent, one would have anticipated his development of a concept of a cyber-nation or some cosmopolitan equivalent. But as I have indicated in chapter 2, I agree with Ian Craib and other critics of Giddens who find him “fox-like” and difficult to follow in general. Giddens really is like quicksilver, or a moving target. He makes a claim about Comte or Durkheim, and then, a bit later, hedges, modifies, or even contradicts himself. Or he makes a statement about modernity, but he qualifies it later. He moves so quickly from topic to topic-perhaps more “bee-like” in this regard-that his claims seem undeveloped. Whenever he takes up other intellectuals, such as Erving Goffman, Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, or Francis Fukuyama, among others, one gets the impression that he reads all of them from the narrow vantage point of how they can be used for his theories. For example, as we have seen in chapter 4, Giddens’s analysis of Freud is nothing like Erich Fromm’s ponderous study Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought (1980). Fromm criticizes Freud, but clearly tries to understand him with some degree of empathy on his own terms and the terms of Freud’s cultural milieu. Giddens does not display empathy toward other thinkers, and, given his narrow understanding of sociology as the study of the modern, he seems unable to comprehend any non-modernist aspects of other thinkers and theories.
