Anthony Giddens Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

The sustaining of life, in a bodily sense as well as in the sense of psychological health, is inherently subject to risk.

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

Anthony Giddens
'Taking charge of one's life' involves risk, because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.

Anthony Giddens
Regimes are modes of self-discipline, but are not solely constituted by the orderings of convention in day-to-day life; they are personal habits, organised in some part according to social conventions, but also formed by personal inclinations and dispositions. Regimes are of central importance to self-identity precisely because they connect habits with aspects of the visible appearance of the body.

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

Anthony Giddens
To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk, the ineveitable concomitants of a system geared to the domination of nature and the reflexive making of history. Fate and destiny have no formal part to play in such a system, which operates (as a matter of principle) via what I shall call open human control of the natural and social worlds.

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

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

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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
The expropriated peasantry are turned en masse into beggars, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. This is met with fierce legislation against vagrancy, by which means the vagabond population is subjected to the discipline necessary for the wage system.

Anthony Giddens
I argued more recently for a hypothecated wealth tax on very high earners to support the campaign against child poverty. Why shouldn't the super-rich be obliged to help the super-poor?

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