Page 95 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-05.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 84

••• John Scott •••

Giddens’ Intellectual Project

Anthony Giddens was born into a lower middle-class family in suburban North
London in 1938. He escaped what he has described as this ‘enclosed wasteland’
through grammar school and university. It was at university – the University of Hull –
that he discovered sociology, studying this in a department that combined social
anthropology with sociology. His undergraduate studies were followed by an MA in
Sociology at the London School of Economics, and he wrote his dissertation on the
sociology of sport under the supervision of David Lockwood. He has candidly admit-
ted that this had more to do with an interest in sport than in sociology, and, fol-
lowing a pattern that he has described as one of drift rather than choice (Giddens
and Pierson, 1998: 38), he obtained a job teaching social psychology in the
Department of Sociology at Leicester University in 1961. The department, at that
time, had the largest concentration of sociologists in Britain. Its dominant influences
were Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias, and it was through the influence of Elias – a
former student of Alfred Weber and teaching assistant to Karl Mannheim – that
Giddens became committed to an academic life. In Elias he discovered a way in
which his interest in sport could be used to enlarge his sociological understanding
and to open up new areas of enquiry.
During brief sabbatical periods in 1968 and 1969 at Simon Fraser University and
the University of California at Los Angeles, Giddens began to read and write for his
first major work, on the classical sociological tradition (Giddens, 1971). He moved to
Cambridge University in 1969, and it was at Cambridge that he produced all his most
important works in social theory, publishing more than ten sole-authored mono-
graphs in the 21 years between 1971 and 1992. In his final years at Cambridge,
Giddens worked on the political implications of his social theory (Giddens, 1994),
and he began to regard his theoretical framework as complete, so far as his own con-
tributions to it were concerned. He moved to a new post as Director of the London
School of Economics in 1997, where he concentrated on the task of integrating this
work with the political project of Tony Blair and the ‘New Labour’ government that
had been elected in that year (Giddens, 1998; 2000). He has been widely described as
Blair’s ‘favourite intellectual’, and after leaving the LSE, he became a member of the
House of Lords in 2004.
Giddens’ earliest explorations in social theory were undertaken as a critical response
to Parsons’ (1937) interpretation of the history of sociology. Parsons had been the
key figure in the mainstream of sociology from the 1940s through to the 1970s, and
even those who were critical of his structural functionalism had largely accepted his
account of the history of sociology. This disciplinary history legitimated sociology in
an often hostile intellectual climate and was a crucial element in the identity of the
professional sociologist. In tackling Parsons’ view of history, then, Giddens was forg-
ing a radically new direction and self-identity for sociology.
Parsons had depicted Durkheim and Weber – and, to a lesser extent, Pareto – as the
towering figures of classical sociology. He saw them as having constructed an

• 84 •