ABSTRACT
Anthony Giddens (born 1938) is the most important British sociologist in over a century (Anderson, 1990). His ambition has been to recast social theory and to reexamine our understanding of the trajectory of modernity, the great transformation that began in the seventeenth century and has never ceased. From a detailed critique of social theorists he developed his structuration theory in the early 1980s and produced path-breaking historical sociology, after which he turned to more substantive analysis of reflexive modernization. Since the late 1980s Giddens has applied this conception and its attendant emphasis on the choices we make in a world of manufactured uncertainty more directly to practical changes. It is for this that he has become known beyond academic circles as the formulator of ‘Third Way’ politics that enjoyed considerable popularity during the late 1990s and beyond among such as President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair, though it should be emphasized that the intellectual foundations for his support of New Labour are rooted in his long-term academic work (Giddens and Pearson, 1998). He served as Director of the London School of Economics from 1997 to 2003 and in 2004 was ennobled. Lord Giddens remains active in the House of Lords. Prolific as he is in scholarly publications, these latter roles and his emphatic shift into politics in recent decades have meant that some of his academic projects remain incomplete.
