Anthony Giddens

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" framework that briefly redrew the political centre. He ran the London School of Economics from 1997 to 2003, and in recent years has aimed that same clarity at climate change and the digital revolution. Thirty-four books, twenty-nine languages, appointments at twenty universities, and still the name students see first on the syllabus.