On Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:10:15 -0500 (EST) Michael Pollak
<mpollak at panix.com> writes:
>
> 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.
Well of course. After all at Harvard back in the day, Talcott Parsons became quite the academic star by writing treatises that nobody could read. And of course there have any number of academics since that time who have become stars by doing pretty much the same thing. Not that there is anything new about this. Voltaire in Candide poked fun at the academics of his day who had acquired fame and fortune by doing the same sort of thing.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
>
> Michael
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