On Fri, 25 Feb 2011, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Also, as Richard Seymour has been pointing out on his blog, Anthony
> Giddens, who use to be a pretty respectable, and respected academic, was
> not only (as we all know) hobnobbing with Tony Blair but also was
> hanging out (and advising) the elder Gadaffy too.
If you want to read something really fatuous in the Gaddafy tent-talk line:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200608280032
Richard Seymour is totally right that Giddens' early work is very respectable (the swot-ups on Marx, Weber and Durkheim, and the one empirical work on the Class Structure of the Advanced Societies -- still all good introductions for graduate students). But his genius was for haute vulgarisation, for explicating clearly the ideas of others and esp. the classics of social theory. Once he started expounding his own theories, it all got very fuzzy very quickly. Which seems to have been an asset in becoming a bankable star.
Michael