Anthony Giddens quotes

Anthony Giddens is a British sociologist renowned for his theory of structuration and influential works on modernity and globalization. His writings have significantly shaped the fields of sociology and social theory. He has also played a key role in shaping contemporary social democratic policies. Here are 24 of his quotes:

The concept of the "isolated individual” is a construction of the bourgeois philosophy of individualism, and serves to conceal the social character which production always manifests.

Anthony Giddens

Human consciousness is conditioned in a dialectical interplay between subject and object, in which man actively shapes the world he lives in at the same time as it shapes him.

Anthony Giddens

To renew the energy expended in physical labour, the worker must be provided with the requirements of his existence as a functioning organism-food, clothing, and shelter for himself and his family. The labour time socially necessary to produce the necessities of life of the worker is the value of the worker's labour power. The latter's value is, therefore, reducible to a specifiable quantity of commodities: those which the worker requires to be able to subsist and reproduce.

Anthony Giddens

The main dimensions of Marx's discussion of alienation are as follows: ... 1. The worker ... has no power to determine the fate of what he produces. ... 2. The work task does not offer intrinsic satisfactions. ... 3. Human relations, in capitalism, tend to become reduced to operations of the market. ... Money promotes the rationalization of social relationships, since it provides an abstract standard in terms of which the most heterogeneous qualities can be compared, and reduced, to one another. ... 4. Some animals do produce, of course, but only in a mechanical, adaptive fashion. Alienated labor reduces human productive activity to the level of adaptation to, rather than active mastery of, nature.

Anthony Giddens

Lifestyles are routined practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity.

Anthony Giddens

The body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.

Anthony Giddens

Political economy ... founds its theory of society upon the self-seeking of the isolated individual. Political economy, in this way, "incorporates private property into the very essence of man.”.

Anthony Giddens

Every left of centre party that gets into power is doomed to disappoint – more so, probably, than governments of the right, since the left aspires more definitively to reshape society. It is a phenomenon found around the world in democratic countries. Once into the grind of day to day government, the left's erstwhile supporters will be quick to say that the party lacks direction, or it has betrayed its values, or that its policies are not radical enough, or all three together. The 1945 Attlee government is fondly remembered by many activists as the most radical and accomplished of all Labour regimes. Yet at the time it was vociferously denounced for its timidity and its lack of purpose.

Anthony Giddens

Marx rejects as "absurd” the contention made by John Stuart Mill, and many of the political economists, that while production is governed by definite laws, distribution is controlled by (malleable) human institutions. Such a view underlies the assumption that classes are merely inequalities in the distribution of income, and therefore that class conflict can be alleviated or even eliminated altogether by the introduction of measures which minimize discrepancies between incomes.

Anthony Giddens

The main form of crude communism is based upon emotional antipathy towards private property, and asserts that all men should be reduced to a similar level, so that everyone has an equal share of property. This is not genuine communism, Marx asserts, since it rests upon the same sort of distorted objectification of labor as is found in the theory of political economy. Crude communism of this sort becomes impelled towards a primitive asceticism, in which the community has become the capitalist instead of the individual. In crude communism, the rule of property is still dominant, but negatively: "Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-establishes itself and satisfies itself in a different way.”.

Anthony Giddens

The new mixed economy looks...for a synergy between public and private sectors.

Anthony Giddens

The risk climate of modernity is thus unsettling for everyone: no one escapes.

Anthony Giddens

To a greater or lesser degree, the project of the self becomes translated into one of the possession of desired goods and the pursuit of artificially framed styles of life. (...) Not just lifestyles, but self-actualisation is packaged and distributed according to market criteria.

Anthony Giddens

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.

Anthony Giddens

The difficulties of living in a secular risk culture are compounded by the importance of lifestyle choices.

Anthony Giddens

The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction.

Anthony Giddens

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

Anthony Giddens

Risk concerns future happenings - as related to present practices - and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised.

Anthony Giddens

High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.

Anthony Giddens

The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.

Anthony Giddens

High-consequence risks have a distinctive quality. The more calamitous the hazards they involve, the less we have any real experience of what we risk: for if things 'go wrong', it is already too late.

Anthony Giddens