ABSTRACT
I have demonstrated that Giddens’s slipperiness, evasiveness, and ambivalence, noted by Craib and other students of Giddens, is actually more subtle, complicated, and significant for what it betrays about his readers than such adjectives would imply. The subtlety is that despite his “fox-like” qualities, Giddens remains an ambivalent Enlightenment modernist, and thereby appeals to many modernists today who are equally ambivalent. The complexity is that despite his disavowal of postmodernity, Giddens actually holds many assumptions in common with the postmodernists. Ambivalence might have been a reproach a generation ago, but in the 1990s, ambivalence has been enshrined as an intellectual virtue in academia as well as in much of social life in general. In fact, in chapter 7, I have pinpointed Giddens’s ambivalence as stemming from a nostalgic yearning for the inner-directedness of yesteryear (hence, his rhetoric concerning social order, agency, clear boundaries, and so on) coupled with a moralistic defense of contemporary other-directedness (hence, his rhetoric concerning dialogue, life politics, engagement, and so on). Throughout this book, I have maintained that Giddens’s popularity is premised on a similar, widespread ambivalence in contemporary Western societies. Most modernists are as uneasy as Giddens in choosing between modernity and postmodernity, social order and chaos, inner-directedness and other-directedness, and other distinct choices. The contemporary intellectual in sociology is an especially ambigous creature, and Giddens speaks for him or her.
