Anthony Giddens

British sociologist (born 1938)

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Born 1938 · age 88United Kingdom

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Wikipedia
51 languages
Cross-language footprint
Age
88
Born 1938
Awards
4
recognised works

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

He's the most assigned author in sociology courses worldwide, and the fifth most-cited scholar in the humanities — not by crafting a single famous idea, but by rewriting the field's foundations three times over, then steering it toward climate and the digital age.

Biography

About

Born 18 January 1938, Giddens first tore down the field's theoretical scaffolding in the early 1970s with works like Capitalism and Modern Social Theory and The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. Then came structuration theory — the refusal to pick sides between human action and social forces — which made him internationally known through books like Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984). By the 1990s he'd shifted to modernity itself: how it reshapes intimacy, identity, politics, producing The Consequences of Modernity (1990) and the "Third Way"…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens

said1964

Political economy … founds its theory of society upon the self-seeking of the isolated individual.

— p. 14 (Quote is from Marx, Early Writings (1964), p. 148).

Anthony Giddens

saidundated

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.

— pp. 12-13.

Anthony Giddens

saidundated

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.

— (describing Marx’s view), p. 21.

Anthony Giddens

saidundated