Page 96 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

approach to sociology that broke with the pre-scientific and ideological approaches
that preceded them. The period between 1890 and 1920, when they and their con-
temporaries produced their works, marked a ‘great divide’ in social theory. Scientific
sociology was firmly entrenched on the ‘modern’ side of this divide and was
uniquely placed to understand the key institutions of the modern society that had
given it birth. Parsons saw himself as the heir to this classical tradition, building on
its foundations to establish a comprehensive framework of scientific sociological
analysis (Giddens, 1976a; 1972b).
Giddens attacked this view root and branch. He recognized the importance of
Durkheim and Weber, though he interpreted their ideas very differently (Giddens,
1971), and he saw greater continuities between them and their predecessors. There
was no single, sharp division between ‘ideology’ and ‘science’, and all social thought
had to be seen as inextricably tied to its social and political context (Giddens, 1972a;
1972c). Most significant, however, was his rehabilitation of Marx. While Parsons had
virtually ignored Marx – assigning him to the ideological side of the great divide –
Giddens sought to incorporate Marx and the wider currents of Marxism into the
mainstream of sociology’s history.
Although Durkheim remains an important figure in Giddens’ work, the key
thinkers in his reconstruction of sociology were Weber and Marx. He initially used
their ideas to build a powerful synthesis of work on social stratification (Giddens,
1973) that can be seen as carrying forward many of the arguments of Lockwood
(Lockwood, 1956; 1958; 1960). The latter was seen, at the time, as a broadening and
enlarging of what was then known as ‘conflict theory’ (Dahrendorf, 1957; Rex, 1961),
the main counter-current to Parsonian ‘consensus theory’. Lockwood, however, was
ambivalent about the label ‘conflict theory’ and preferred to emphasize the contri-
bution of his work to a larger systemic study of social life (Lockwood, 1964; see
also Scott, 1995: Ch. 5). Giddens, too, saw that a broader conspectus was necessary,
and he began an extensive programme of reading into emerging ideas in ethno-
methodology, linguistic philosophy, and hermeneutics, and these soon led him to a
consideration of structuralism. This reading bore its first fruit in his New Rules of
Sociological Method (Giddens, 1976b), where he set out what he has described as the
‘overall project’ that was to guide his work for the next 20 years (Giddens and
Pierson, 1998: 44).
This intellectual project was to understand the form of modernity that had moti-
vated the works of the classical sociological theorists and to explore the distinctive
features and continuing transformation of contemporary modernity. Giddens
brought together a critical reading of French and German theory (Giddens, 1979)
with a comprehensive reassessment of Marx’s social theory (Giddens, 1981), and
from the middle of the 1980s he moved from critical exposition to a presentation of
his own views on the origins and future of modernity (Giddens, 1984; 1985; 1990).
He built a definitive theoretical framework, which he came to call ‘structuration the-
ory’, and he applied this to the emergence and transformation of modernity. During
the early 1990s, he returned to some of the social psychological issues with which he
had been concerned in his earliest teaching job, tracing the relationships between

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