Anthony Giddens Quotes

The new mixed economy looks…for a synergy between public and private sectors.

Taking charge of one’s life involves risk because it means confronting a diversity of open possibilities.

Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

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

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

The body is an object in which we are all privileged, or doomed, to dwell, the source of feelings of well-being and pleasure, but also the site of illnesses and strains. (…) [I]t is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity.

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.

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

[C]ultivated risk-taking represents an ‘experiment with trust’ (in the sense of basic trust) which consequently has implications for an individual’s self-identity. (…) In cultivated risk-taking, the encounter with danger and its resolution are bound up in the same activity, whereas in other consequential settings the payoff of chosen strategies may not be seen for years afterwards.

In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of preparing a course of future actions mobilised in terms of the self’s biography. We may also speak here of the existence of personal calendars or life-plan calendars, in relation to which the personal time of the lifespan is handled.

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming ‘I have a nightmare’

Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects (…), but it is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising the future. The more or less constant, profound and rapid momentum of change characteristic of modern institutions, coupled with structured reflexivity, mean that on the level of everyday practice as well as philosophical [Seitenwechsel] interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted. What is acceptable/appropriate/recommended behaviour today may be seen differently tomorrow in the light of altered circumstances or incoming knowledge-claims.