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A Selection of Anthony Giddens Quotes

Anthony Giddens is one of the most prominent sociologists and political scientists whose works are widely read in the academia. He was the Director of the London School of Economics from 1997 to 2003. He served ast he adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair. Anthony Giddens‘ essay The Third Way was widely applied by the then Prime Minister.

Anthony Giddens Selected Quotes

We are abroad in a world that is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time we can never be sure that any given element of that knowledge will not be revised.

Anthony Giddens

Perception is organized via anticipatory schemata whereby the individual anticipates new incoming information while simultaneously mentally digesting old.

Anthony Giddens

Risk and danger, as experienced in relation t o ontological security, have become secularised along with most other aspects of social life.

Anthony Giddens

Civil inattention is the most basic type of facework commitment involved in encounters with strangers in circumstances of modernity.

Anthony Giddens

Globalisation refers essentially to that stretching process, in so far as the modes of connection between different social contexts or regions become networked across the earth’s surface as a whole.

Anthony Giddens

Rules relate on the one hand to the constitution of meaning, and on the other to the sanctioning of modes of social conduct.

Anthony Giddens

Modernity is inherently globalising-this is evident in some of the most basic characteristics of modern institutions, including particularly their disembeddedness and reflexivity.

Anthony Giddens

In various otherwise divergent forms of thought, sociology has been understood as generating knowledge modern social life which can be used in the interests of prediction and control.

Anthony Giddens

The world in which we live today is a fraught and dangerous one. This has served to do more than simply blunt or force us to qualify the assumption that the emergence of modernity would lead to the formation of a happier and more secure social order.

Anthony Giddens

The modes of life brought into being by modernity have swept us away from all traditional types of social order, in quite unprecedented fashion.

Anthony Giddens

The consequences of what actors do, intentionally or unintentionally, are events which would not have happened if that actor had behaved differently, but which are not within the scope of the agent’s power to have brought about.

Anthony Giddens

Social systems are constituted as regularized practices: power within social systems can thus be treated as involving reproduced relations of autonomy and dependence in social interaction. Power relations are always two-way, even if the power of one actor or party in a social relation is minimal compared to another. Power relations are relations of autonomy and dependence, but even the most autonomous agent is in some degree dependent, and the most dependent actor or party in a relationship retains some autonomy

Anthony Giddens

The dynamism of modernity derives from the separation of time and space and their recombination in forms which permit the precise time-space ‘zoning’ of social life; the disembedding of social systems (a phenomenon which connects closely with the factors involved in time-space separation); and the reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations in the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of individuals and groups.

Anthony Giddens

The long-standing influence of social evolutionism is one of the reasons why the discontinuist character of modernity has often not been fully appreciated.

Anthony Giddens

Even those theories which stress the importance of discontinuist transitions, like that of Marx, see human history as having an overall direction, governed by general dynamic principles.

Anthony Giddens

The modes of life brought into being by modernity have swept us away from all traditional types of social order, in quite unprecedented fashion.

Anthony Giddens

Sociology is a very broad and diverse subject, and any simple generalisations about it as a whole are questionable.

Anthony Giddens

To understand the intimate connections between modernity and the transformation of time and space, we have to start by drawing some contrasts with time-space relations in the pre-modern world.

Anthony Giddens

What is money? Economists have never been able to agree about an answer to this question.

Anthony Giddens

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