Anthony Giddens and the Liberal TraditionAnthony Giddens: Critical Assessments by Christopher G. A. Bryant; David JaryReview by: Dennis SmithThe British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 661-669Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/591294 .Accessed: 24/10/2012 07:08

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Dennis Smith

REVIEW ARTICLE: Anthony Giddens and the liberal tradition

ABSTRACT

Anthony Giddens: Cr7tical Assessments provides a useful overview of critical scholar- ship on Giddens. It also stimulates reflections on the significance of Giddens's career and writings. The book illustrates the uniting effect Giddens's work has had within the notoriously multi-paradigmatic arena of the social sciences by pro- viding a common reference point for both disciples and critics. For his part, Giddens has been very adept at incorporating criticisms into his intellectual struc- tures in order to repair and strengthen them. Giddens's career should be seen in the context of broader developments within the British social sciences over the past thirty years. He has established himself as the latest representative of a liberal tradition. In this respect his predecessor was T H Marshall. There is a family resemblance between the central themes upon which Marshall and the [later] Giddens focus. Marshall is concerned with the potential conflict between a regime of social rights and a social order governed by the rules of the capitalist market. Giddens explores the difficulty within modern societies of maintaining efficient systems based upon bureaucracy, professional expertise and the global- ized market while also constructing meaningful self-identities. Both Marshall and Giddens have a strong belief in the importance of the creatively active individual.

KEYWORDS: Giddens; T H Marshall; liberalism; sociology; LSE; tradition

Anthony Giddens: CriticalAssessments, is weighty in every sense. It comes in four volumes, encased in a maroon box. At £425 the set, librarians will be the principal purchasers. Christopher Bryant and David Jary have brought together a grand total of ninety-three articles, reviews and chapters on Giddens, organized into eight thematic sections. These pieces cover a period of a quarter of a century, from a review of Capitalism and Modern Social Theory by Steven Lukes which appeared in 1972, to Sydow and Windeler's use of a structuralist perspective in the analysis of inter-firm networks, published for the first time in this volume. This massive collection seems destined to have two uses.l One is to provide initial orientation, or even a short cut, for students faced with coursework assignments on Giddens. The other is to stimulate further reflections on the significance of the career and writings of Giddens, especially among members of the generation that has lived

Brzt. Jnl. of Socioloe Volume no. 49 Issue no. 4 December 1998 ISSN 0007-1315 (C) London School of Economics 1998

662 Dennis Smith through all or most of the quarter of a century embodied in these 1700 pages. I'll try to address both these constituencies.

You should pay particular attention to the next section if you are a student preparing assignments with such titles as: 'Assess the work and career of Giddens', 'What are the main intellectual influences upon struct- uration theory?', 'Does Giddens provide a satisfactory epistemology or normative theory?', 'What are the main strengths and weaknesses of struc- turation theory?', 'How successfully does Giddens integrate time-space relations into his analysis of structuration?', 'How convincing is Giddens's critique of historical materialism?', 'Critically assess Giddens's portrayal of modernity, reflexive modernization and self-identity', and 'Discuss the adequacy of attempts to extend and apply structuration theory through empirical research'. In fact, these eight themes are dealt with, in turn, in the eight sections which make up this book. Section one on the work and career as a whole has some early reviews by Margareta Bertilsson, Ian Craib and Martin Albrow and a piece by Loic Wacquant, left in the original French, which praises Giddens for breaking down modernity into its partially autonomous logics [capitalism, indus- trialism, surveillance, militarism] while fearing that he may be producing no more than 'a web of conceptual distinctions disconnected from the real world and from the practice of research'.2 However, the most interesting contributions are the assessments by Clegg and Kilminster, to which I will return later, and two interviews Giddens gave in 1982-3, by which time New Rules of Sociological Method [with its forays into continental philosophy] and A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism [engaging with Marxist his- toriography], had both appeared. In one interview [with Bob Mullan] Giddens expresses clearly three ambitions: to be taken seriously as a criti- cal commentator on the sociological classics, to produce an extended account of the main institutions of industrialized countries, and to see structuration theory taken up and applied in further theoretical work, empirical research and in books that 'make connections with the people that sociology is supposed to be about'.3

In the other interview [with Bleicher and Featherstone], Giddens declares that he wants

to follow the strategy of firing critical salvos into reality and attempting to focus them around [such issues as] the distinctiveness of the modern world, the implications of that by contrast to the traditional world, what this leaves in the way of obvious formulae for political theory and then how one can, as it were, spin a web around them. His object is to work 'from within a sociological conception which would seem to suggest that some things are clearly noxious and other things are

Anthony Giddens and the liberal tradition 663

clearly desirable and that it isn't necessary to ground them in order to pro- claim this to be so'.4 By the time these interviews were given, Giddens had acquired an 'un-English'5 interest in continental theorists. However, there is something highly indigenous about the relaxed tone imbued with moral confidence which comes through so strongly in the remarks just quoted. The spirit and tone are urbane and liberal-minded. There are distinct echoes of T. H. Marshall, a man who spent his life firing critical salvoes into reality, spinning intellectual and other webs, puzzling out the distinctive- ness of the modern world, and separating out the noxious from the desir- able. These echoes will be explored shortly.

The second section is on Giddens's 'use of other writers, past and present'.6 Here Giddens is presented, in effect, as the Great Critical Appro- priater, selectively absorbing what he could use or adapt in a productive way from not only the classics but also Garfinkel [but not Blumer], Foucault, Ricoeur, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Heidegger, and many others. The papers included range from the generally approving [Lukes, Ken Thompson, Bauman, Poggi], via the neutral [Mendoza] through the mildly critical [Sica] to the more strongly disapproving [Boyne, Gane].

This is followed by a section on epistemology, theory and criticism, focus- ing mainly on Giddens's discussion of positivism, his Studies in Social and Political Theory and, above all, New Rules of Sociological Method. Three issues surface here. The first is the question of how much attention a theory which stresses the skilled accomplishments of social actors in producing society also needs to pay to the role of material production [Urry]. The second is how plausible it is for Giddens to assume an actual reality while being sus- picious of realism and foundationalism as philosophical positions [McLel- lan, Cohen]. The third is whether Giddens manages to integrate a critical theory into his structuration theory [Bernstein, Livesay]. In Livesay's view, Habermas tends to stress normative grounding at the expense of praxis while Giddens neglects normative grounding in favour of praxis in the guise of structuration.

Section four, the longest, turns directly to the principles of structuration theory. There are eight pieces taken from the period before the publication of The Constitution of Society. This is a good place to compare the differences between Giddensian structuration analysis and the approaches taken by writers such as Bhaskar, Archer, Shotter and Layder. Among the eleven pieces from the post-Constitution period, there can be found useful discus- sions of Gadamer [by Dickie-Clark], Freud and Lacan [Willmott] as well as critical responses by, among others, Bryan Turner,John Thompson, Nicos Mouzelis and HansJoas. AsJoas puts it

It would be a miracle if in the case of such an ambitious and broadly con- ceived outline of a theory as the one presented by Giddens, there did not remain a plethora of internal problems of the theory's construction and of substantive difficulties in the theory's further elaboration.7

The fifth section, on time-space, charts Giddens's engagement with

664 Dennis Smith

modern geography and geographers. Like many others, Tommy Carlstein [writing in the Swedish Geographical Yearbook] has problems decoding Giddens's treatment of structure as 'a virtual order of differences'.8 In fact, the tone of the whole section is 'yes, but ...' For example, Giddens is praised for opening up fresh ways of thinking in geography and sociology but criticized for lack of systematization [Storper], and for being stronger on time than space [Soja, Urry]. Section six deals with responses to the big books on capitalism, historical materialism, class, power and the nation- state. Once again, the critical attacks come in along an extended front. Giddens is told that his treatment of historical materialism is inadequate [Hirst], that he is too ready to dismiss evolutionary and developmental approaches to historical change Jary, Wright], that he neglects or misin- terprets important historical facts [Skocpol, Breuilly, Smith], and that his approach would benefit from more grounded comparative analysis [Held] .

In section seven, on modernity, reflexive modernization and the con- temporary politics of emancipation and self-identity, the nature of the criti- cal engagements seems to change. Instead of sustained machine gun fire along a fairly clear battle front, combat takes the form of individual dog fights with no clear sense of overall direction. Giddens, it seems, caused con- fusion for a while among his critics by shifting his focus from structuration to modernity. However, gun-sites were soon readjusted and in this section we have, for example, Bauman asking pointed questions about Giddens's treatment of love relationships in The Transformation of Intimacy, Hay et al. finding insufficient evidence of a link between 'late modernity' and an 'ethos of self-growth', Tucker wondering where aesthetics, play and cultural traditions fit into Giddens's scheme of things, and Beck arguing that domes- tic labour is not modern but anti-modern. Finally, section eight contains articles in which structuration theory is elaborated further [Stones on the strategic context of action, Bryant on the dialogical model of applied soci- ology] and applied in empirical research. The practical applications include work in religious studies, organizational analysis, management, geography, education, archaeology and accountancy. It is impossible to summarize this work but, arguably, this section is the most useful in the whole volume in view of the common complaint that Giddens's ideas are purely theoretical and have no empirical applications.

Taken together, these eight sections illustrate dramatically the unifying effect Giddens's work has had within the social sciences. Not in the sense of imposing a uniform intellectual framework; the multi-paradigmatic state of our disciplines is notorious. Rather, in the sense of providing a common reference point. Giddens's theoretical construction provides a target that can be seen from all points of the compass, although he is very skilled at using the same stones thrown at the structure to repair and strengthen it. In some respects, the oeurre is rather like the Spanish Empire in the early modern period. Giddens has planted his flag throughout Europe and con- quered large tracts of the New World. It may be too much to expect that this extraordinary feat should be matched by an equally impressive process

665 Anthony Giddens and the liberal tradition

of internal rationalization within the appropriated territories. We may have to settle for less. In sum, there are unresolved ambiguities and contradic- tions within the resulting imperium but it seems destined to persist for a long time to come. This leads on to this paper's second major theme.

II

Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments is not just a tribute to Giddens the soci- ologist [or social theorist]. It is also a monument to Giddens the socio- logical phenomenon. It is not difficult to list attributes which have contributed to a successful academic career: shrewdness, determination, enormous energy, organizational ability, openness to new ideas, and an impressive lecturing style, for example. However, the issue is larger than Giddens's personal success. His own career should be seen in the context of broader developments within the British social sciences over the last thirty years. In fact, he has established himself as the latest representative of a liberal tradition within British social science. Before making this case, it is useful to mention two perceptive analyses of 'the Giddens phenom- enon'9 reprinted in Bryant andJary.

In 'How to become an internationally famous British social theorist', Stewart Clegg examines how 'the conditions of . . . production, dissemina- tion and reception' enjoyed by Giddens's work 'aided its reception as a high-status good in the intellectual market place.' Clegg salutes Giddens's early success in tying Durkheim into the classical pantheon alongside Marx and Weber, supplying these materials to 'a rapidly growing product market' of courses in sociological theory, and then applying the trinity of classics, especially Marx and Weber, to the topic of class, a mainstay of British empirical sociology since the early postwar days.

As a non-Marxist scholar of Marx, Giddens 'offered the North American establishment a risk-free stepping stone towards European Marxism.' If the early work by Giddens was legitimated by its classic or traditional subject matter, the subsequent forays in New Rules and later books were legitimated because they were by Giddens, argues Clegg. Thereafter market pen- etration was aided by establishing a strong brand-image or label [struc- turation] and tapping into prestigious intellectual resources such as linguistics, analytical philosophy and the Heideggerian tradition. The next phase involved building a bridge [through a critique of functionalism and sympathetic readings of Garfinkel and Goffman] to the Theory and Society agenda of 'creative contemporary American theory engaging with Euro- pean traditions.' As the sociological market place went into decline during the late 1970s, social theory offered expanding opportunities: 'The strategy was clear: establish new supplier markets in history, geography and else- where and create new core products from the new resource bases.' Finally, a first-year textbook with distinct British and American editions began the

666 Dennis Smith

process of establishing Giddensian structuration as 'normal science' within an international arena.l°

Contrast the approach taken by Richard Kilminster in his 'Structuration theory as a world-view'. Rather than seeing Giddens as a shrewd marketeer, Kilminster see him as standing in a liberal tradition that has emphasized 'the freedom and self-actualization of the individual', a tradition reinforced by 'the self-experience and type of conscience-formation of individuals in the increasingly complex networks of interdependencies of urbanized, advanced societies'. There is no space here to dojustice to the complex and fascinating argument made by Kilminster, for example, his insightful comment that Giddens tries 'to deal with interdependence in the language of interaction'. However, the relevant point is that Giddens is portrayed as a morally-concerned and committed intellectual liable to use 'highly evalu- ative and emotional language' about the way capitalism corrodes and destroys the traditional world. Confronted with a world that capitalism has made both banal and dangerous, Giddens stresses the capacity of skilled human agents to make a difference by their actions.ll

There is no contradiction between the approaches taken by Clegg and Kilminster. Why not use the channels provided by capitalism as a way to provide people with the means of understanding it? There are some dis- tinguished precedents, not leastJohn Stuart Mill whose 'people's edition' of his P7anciples of Political Economy went through five editions in his life- time.l2 Talking of famous liberals, it is worth returning to the case of T. H. Marshall, the main predecessor within the tradition in which Giddens stands. Marshall was the heir of L. T. Hobhouse's evolutionary liberalism, a powerful background influence upon British social science in the immediate postwar years. At LSE, Morris Ginsberg developed this agenda within a comparative framework. Meanwhile, Marshall focused on the British case which he treated as a kind of ideal type. In his analysis of citizen- ship, Marshall noted that market capitalism is most dynamic and produc- tive in the climate of universal individual liberty fostered by civil rights. However, Marshall asked: how can the economic inequalities generated within market capitalism be reconciled with a guarantee that the social rights of citizenship shall be enjoyed on equal terms by all? This question has been central to the postwar debate in social science and in politics.

This debate has been closely tied in to the British political climate and the changing institutional position of the social sciences. Three phases may be distinguished. In the first phase, during the quarter of a century after World War II a number of prominent studies monitored the extent to which social democracy was able to fulfill its universalistic promises and surmount the barriers thrown up in the British version of capitalist society.l3 However, in the second phase, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, attempts to reconcile social democracy and capitalism were treated with increasing scepticism. The Olympian style of Marshall was displaced by a wave of more engaged Marxian analysis and action. Student audiences were told, to over- simplify, that the institutional apparatus of social democracy was a sham

667 A n thony Gid d ens and the liberal trad ition

mounted by an illiberal state acting on behalf of an exploitative and alien- ating capitalist system. This had two medium-term effects. First, it weakened the moral claim and ideological defense system of the very educational insti- tutions in which sociology had become entrenched [since their 'repressive tolerance' was part of the 'ideological state apparatus']. Second, it gave implicit permission for future governments to abandon the polite con- sideration and restraint they had previously exercised in dealing with higher education. The liberal baton was handed from Marshall to Giddens in the course of the third phase. During the 1970s and 1980s the central question in the social sciences was changed, in some respects reluctantly, from 'why is British social democracy not working as it should and how can we make it work better?' to 'how does capitalism actually work and which aspects of the social democratic inheritance are compatible with a productive and com- petitive capitalist economy?'l4 The benign evolutionism of Hobhouse, Gins- berg and Marshall was defunct. The promise of Marxism was exploded. It was against this background that scholars such as Runciman, Urry and Giddens set about reworking the ontological and epistemological foun- dations of sociology.l5 As Giddens moved on to the further challenge of identifying the distinctive characteristics of capitalist modernity, he adopted an analytical style which is surprisingly reminiscent of Marshall. For example, like Marshall, Giddens draws from the 'real world' what he judges to be its underlying essence, formulates this as an ideal-type, and then proceeds to explore the tensions within the ideal-type he has formu- lated. Marshall does this in his discussion of citizenship, Giddens in his analysis of modernity.l6 There is a family resemblance between the central themes upon which the two writers focus: Marshall upon the potential con- flict between a regime of social rights and a social order governed by the rules of the capitalist market, Giddens upon the difficulty within modern societies of maintaining efficient systems based upon bureaucracy, pro- fessional expertise and the globalized market while also constructing meaningful self-identities. At the heart of both analyses is a strong belief in the need for energetic and creative individuals. Intriguingly, like Giddens later on, Marshall had strong connections with four influential institutions: Cambridge, LSE, the sociology department at Leicester University,l7 and the Labour party.l8

Marshall's impeccable credentials as a member of the British establish- ment helped to maintain sociology's respectability and credibility at a time when it was a minority discipline struggling to survive within a sector dominated by the public schools and Oxbridge. The significance of such individuals with 'good' connections is great within a discipline whose insti- tutional defenses as a profession have been slow to develop, especially when compared to the USA. The social sciences now play to a mass audi- ence in higher education. The social and political climate has changed. However, strategically placed individuals still matter a great deal, as much for what they represent as what they do, which is bound to be limited by

668 Dennis Smith

institutional constraints. The elite configuration of British society was the subject of one of Giddens's earliest projects, which resulted in the publi- cation of Elites and Power in British Society [1974].19 Giddens has now become part of the configuration he was examining a quarter of a century before. The social sciences reap a benefit from his high profile and good works. If Tony Giddens did not exist, we would probably find it necessary to invent him.

(Date accepted: June 1998) Dennis Smith Aston Business School

Aston University

A review of Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments edited by Christopher G.A. Bryant and DavidJary. London and NewYork: Routledge, 1997, 4 volumes: 405pp., 408pp., 408pp., 521pp., £425

NOTES

1. The works by Giddens referred to in this article are as follows: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1971; The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, London: Hutchinson, 1973; (co-edited with P. Stan- worth), Elites and Power in British Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974; New Rules of Sociological Method, London: Hutchinson, 1976; Studies in Social and Political Theory, London: Hutchinson, 1977; Central Problems in Social Theory, London: Macmillan, 1979; A Con- temporary Critique of Historical Materzalism, London: Macmillan, 1981; The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984; The Nation-State and Violence, Cambridge: Polity, 1985; Sociology, Cambridge: Polity, 1989; The Consequences of Modernity, Cam- bridge: Polity Press, 1990; Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991; The Transformation of Intimacy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992; Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

2. C. G .A. Bryant and D. Jary (eds) 1997 Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments, London and NewYork: Routledge, 159-60.

3. Ibid., 94. 4. Ibid., 36. 5. Ibid., 74. 6. Ibid., 171. 7. Ibid., 193.

8. Ibid., 13. 9. Ibid., 151.

10. Ibid., 140, 145, 149, 151. 11. Ibid., 103, 110, 119, italics in original. 12. See D. Smith 1931 Capitalist Democracy on Trial, London: Routledge. 13. For example, M. Young and P. Wilmott 1962 Family and Kinship in East London, Harmondsworth: Penguin; P. Wilmott and M. Young 1971 Family and Class in a London Suburb, London: New English Library; O. L. Banks 1956 Parity and Prestige in Secondary Education, London: Routledge;J. Floud, A. H. Halsey and F. M. Martin 1950 Social Class and Edu- cational Opportunity, London: Heinemann; J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood 1968-9 The AfJ7uent Worker, 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Apart from Marshall, another key figure in these years was Michael Young, director of the Labour Party Research Department between 1945 and 1951. 14. For example, R. E. Pahl 1984 Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell; H. Newby 1979 The Deferential Worker, Harmondsworth: Penguin; R. P. Dore 1973 British Factory, Japanese Factory, Berkeley: University of California Press; J. P. Scott 1986 Capitalist Property and Financial Power. A comparative study of Britain, the United States and Japan, Brighton: Wheatsheaf; J.

Anthony Giddens and the liberal tradition 669

H. Goldthorpe (ed) 1984 Orderand Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism, Oxford: Claren- don Press; J. Gershuny 1983 Social Inno- vation and the Division of Labour, Oxford: Oxford University Press; D. Gallie 1983 Social Inequality and Class Radicalism in France and Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15. See, for example, W. G. Runciman 1983 A Treatise on Social Theory, Volume One: The methodology of social theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; W. G. Runci- man 1989 A Treatise on Social Theory, Volume Two: Substantive social theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; J. Urry 1981 An Anatomy of Capitalist Societies, London: Macmillan; R. Keat andJ. Urry 1975 Social Theory as Science, London: Routledge. 16. See, for example, Modernity and Self- Identity, 2, where Giddens states quite explicitly that his argument 'at some key

junctures relies on ideal-typical pro- cedures to substantiate its points.' 17. The Leicester department was the major supplier of academic sociologists to higher education during the 1960s and early 1970s. Marshall was a friend of both Norbert Elias and Ilya Neustadt, leading members of the department. 18. Marshall was the son of a successful architect. His public school education was capped by a Cambridge fellowship. See T. H. Marshall 1973 'A British sociological career,' International Social ScienceJournal, 25 (1-2): 89-100. T. H. Marshall 1963 Soci- ology at the Crossroads and Other Essays, London: Heinemann; D. Smith 1991 The Rise of Historical Sociology, Cambridge: Polity 27-33. 149-51. 19. P. Stanworth and A. Giddens (eds) 1974 Elites and Power in British Society, Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press.