The Road (Not?) Taken: Anthony Giddens, the Third Way, and the Future of Social Democracy
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
THE "THIRD WAY" iS the subject of countless articles, op-ed columns, policy papers, international conferences, and the public pronouncements by heads of state from Bill Clinton to...
...It isn't for him a Fukuyaman utopia...
...est possibilities of creativity and rebellion ac1. See Joanne Barkan's clever annotation, "The Third Way/ Die Neu Mitte," Dissent (Spring 2000), pp...
...In the world in which we live, this is no mean thing...
...In the words of Beck, "skepticism, contrary to widespread error, makes everything possible again: ethics, morality, knowledge, faith, society, and criticism, but differently, a few sizes smaller, more tentative, more revisable and more capable of learning and thus more curious, more open to the unsuspected...
...113-14...
...A major sub-theme of his book, echoed in John Gray's False Dawn, is that Northern European models of social democratic renewal are in many ways preferable to the American model...
...There are other examples of this in The Third Way and its Critics...
...Tony Blair famously describes his three main priorities in government as 'education, education, educaDISSENT / Spring 2001 n 65 tion.' . . . Yet the idea that education can reduce inequalities in a direct way should be regarded with some skepticism...
...He does neither...
...Giddens's formulations are often prolix, and there are lacunae in his account...
...Soundings 13 (Autumn 1999), pp...
...This rethinking is, for Giddens, an accomplished fact of political life, and it is only on this new intellectualpolitical terrain that it makes sense to argue about politics...
...Much of what he says about the limits of anticorporate rhetoric is indeed sensible...
...Boosting the third way, he is quite amazingly credulous about what the future holds—and not so far, ironically, from some of his left critics who expect a new proletarian internationalism capable of contesting global capital...
...But Giddens offers no serious discussion of what is possible, instead simply taking for granted the neoliberal position because of its political dominance...
...In these roles he has worked with indefatigable energy to promote his ideas...
...That book—like the work then being generated by neo-Marxists such as Nicos Poulantzas and Erik Olin Wright—argued that the class relations of postindustrial capitalist societies were more complex than classical Marxism envisaged...
...But it steers us away from a triumphalism of either the present or the future, toward whatever mod...
...As a result, social democratic parties in general have been politically weakened, and neoliberals have exploited this weakness and successfully delegitimized welfarist institutions and policies...
...Giddens's horizon is the horizon of Blair and Clinton, the horizon of a humanized neoliberalism, where public policy takes some of the edge off of the externalities and injustices of capitalism and promotes new forms of "human" and "social" capital— but does not propose any more fundamental reform...
...Alex Callinicos, "Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens," New Left Review 236 (July-August 1999...
...Both his notoriety and the extraordinary hostility he is capable of inspiring are due to the specific role he has carved out for himself as a British public intellectual in the age of New Labour...
...Still, his arguments are not reducible to the Blair/Clinton policies.' For one thing, if the actual tendency of Blair's thirdway policy is to emulate the American model, Giddens insists that "welfare expenditure remain at European rather than US levels...
...Such policies can do some good, particularly when measured against those of a less benign neoliberalism...
...What emerged was a view of sociology centered on the complex relations between capitalism and modernity...
...He maintains that "it is no longer feasible, or desirable, to have very steeply graduated income tax of the sort that existed in many countries thirty years ago...
...According to Giddens, social democratic leaders and policy analysts have registered the changed conditions, placing heightened emphasis on postindustrial issues, and recognizing the inadequacy of conventional welfare state redistributions and Keynesian demand management in an age of rampant globalization...
...Giddens as Social Theorist Before becoming an academic adviser to the political stars, Giddens was well known as a prolific and eclectic social theorist...
...But his comments add nothing of substance to the discussion of corporate power...
...Anthony Giddens is clearly the most visible and important social theorist today to develop and defend this idea of a third way...
...He has also been sharply criticized by many on the left for what they see as a capitulation to the political status quo...
...Reducing benefits to force individuals into work pushes them into already crowded lowwage labor markets...
...Drawing from Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault, Giddens criticized scientistic perspectives--whether behavioralist or Marxist—and "interpretive" approaches, in the name of a distinctive conception of critical theory...
...But saying that doesn't establish the validity of his claims about the third way as a strategy of "renewal...
...Giddens has nothing to offer when it comes to rebuilding union movements in postindustrial societies or developing new forms of global labor solidarity...
...But given the current constellation of political forces and the demographic and ideological trends behind them, there is little reason to expect anything more radical than what Blair or Clinton represent...
...Although Giddens in my view rightly discerns the limits of a more ambitious left politics, he fails to acknowledge the limits of what has replaced such a politics...
...Here it is useful to compare Giddens's account of globalization to that defended by Zygmunt Bauman in Globalization: The Human Consequences...
...In the course of this debate, important policy disagreements emerged regarding the historical significance of Livingstone's GLC, the desirability of support for Livingstone (who at that time was gearing up for what became his successful insurgent candidacy for mayor of London), and about whether essential public services such as transport and education should be open to experimental forms of private investment (this became the central issue of Livingstone's campaign—and came back to haunt him after his victory...
...New Political Economy, 4, no...
...He is too often clearer about what he is against—above all, old-style social democratic income redistribution—than about what he is for—beyond expanded educational opportunities and the subsidy of third-sector institutions...
...It allows us to question, to express indignation, to grope for alternatives, but without the hope of One Big Alternative...
...Giddens's third way is probably best seen as a politics of critical engagement with the forces of globalization...
...Civil Society (London: Polity Press, 1988...
...Alex Callinicos has rightly derided such a chastened approach as a "de-ideologization of politics," a "coming to terms with liberal capitalism...
...Such a sensibility does not require us to accommodate ourselves to capitalism or to the political compromises of the center...
...In my analysis of Giddens's project, I want to make three basic points...
...oNETHELEss, Giddens's overall argument, in spite of its limits, is in many ways superior to those of his critics from the left...
...It is based on a cogent political analysis...
...What is missing, quite simply, is any account of the politically constraining effects of the unequal distribution of money and power or any serious treatment of politics as a domain of conflict...
...The left, he contends, has suffered a double blow: the demise of communism in Eastern Europe decisively destroyed the imagery of a revolutionary alternative to capitalism, and the paralysis of social democracy in Western Europe, associated with a widely acknowledged crisis of the welfare state, raised doubts about any kind of left politics...
...They cannot eliminate the problems of inequality and insecurity that they are intended to "solve...
...The promotion of citizens' councils and new deliberative forums, at the local, regional, and global levels, is another major theme of Giddens's third way...
...14-24, and Alan Finlayson, "Tony Blair and the Jargon of Modernization," Soundings 10 (Winter 1998...
...and no one has an intellectually or politically credible idea of how to stop them...
...It is his disinclination, and perhaps his inability, to acknowledge the limitations of this new thinking in the face of powerful antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian social forces at work in the world, to recognize the tragic limitations of what remains of the "historic project" that once went confidently by the name of "the left," and, correlatively, to endorse the campaigns and movements that push for more substantial reforms...
...family-friendly workplace policies...
...WHAT is needed today is less credulity and more skepticism toward both globalization and simpleminded challenges to it...
...9. Anthony Giddens and Hilary Wainwright, "Is There Such a Thing as a Third Way in Politics...
...Whatever critical edge the earlier book possessed is lost, and the conclusion that Giddens has become a celebrant of neoliberal globalization becomes more difficult to avoid...
...IN SUBSEQUENT works, Giddens expanded on these themes...
...As many critics have observed, the communitarian, win-win rhetoric of his programmatic arguments ignores the obstacles to the values and policies he supports and the possibility of backlash against these policies.' There is an almost Panglossian character to Giddens's political vision...
...Giddens, by contrast, is always upbeat in his account...
...But Giddens located such possibilities less in the working class than in "new social movements" associated with peace, democracy, feminism, and ecology...
...A skepticism of this kind is defended by one of Giddens's intellectual mentors, Beck, and it is implicit in the best of what Giddens has written in recent years...
...but they are limited and frustrating, in ways that need frankly to be acknowledged...
...As I have argued, Giddens's third way is more than this...
...Contending that programs of change ought to be grounded in an understanding of existing possibilities, he insisted that "we must keep to the Marxian principle that avenues for desired social change will have little practical impact if they are not connected to institutionally immanent possibilities...
...There are good reasons why such a skepticism is rarely articulated publicly...
...Giddens responded by arguing that Wainwright's position was "formulaic" (with its "New Left" appeals), too nostalgic for Livingstone's short-lived Greater London Council (GLC), and insufficiently attuned to the challenges of globalization...
...70 n DISSENT / Spring 2001...
...In these early works Giddens asked big questions, from a vantage point on the left, broadly construed...
...For, beyond his writing, Giddens is also the founder and editor of Polity Press, an important publisher of social theory...
...Such a skepticism presses against the grain of contemporary society...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political science and directs the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University...
...Almost to the contrary, it is one of dislocation and uncertainty, a "runaway world...
...Giddens, on the other hand, is more amenable to public/private partnerships involving capital, though he insists that such efforts should not sacrifice public control...
...Here Giddens's critics are on to something...
...On the other hand, he repudiates a defense of the welfare state status quo ante—first, because these arrangements were ethically flawed, excessively bureaucratic and corporatist, and insufficiently attentive to the importance of "social capital," which cannot be sustained simply through statist redistributions...
...So Giddens's argument goes beyond the Blair agenda, in both purposiveness and comprehensiveness...
...In short, while I am inclined to believe that the third way is neoliberalism with a human face, I doubt that it is simply this and, moreover, I wonder whether there is any reason to expect from contemporary politics anything more than this...
...But here we are still firmly within the confines of global capitalism, on Giddens's terrain, the terrain of a third way that lacks the vision or power of previous historical versions of the left, to which the left today relates primarily as gadfly rather than hegemonic alternative...
...Although he rejects aggressive programs of nationalization, planning, or redistribution, he envisages the third way as a multiplicity of policy experiments that address a range of social problems associated with the negative effects of contemporary capitalism...
...experiments in city and/or regional government, such as Sustainable Milwaukee or Livingstone's London, are other examples...
...It registers issues of immigration, multiculturalism, and exclusion, but what is most fractious and nasty in politics today—calls for "ethnic cleansing," the resurgence of social Darwinian racism, or the scapegoating of "foreigners"—is not discussed...
...But it is hard to see how one can intelligently defend what Callinicos wants—an adversarial effort somehow to transcend capitalism or to challenge globally what he calls "the structures of capitalist domination...
...This does not mean that we have arrived at the end of history...
...8 Wainwright insists that such services ought to be publicly financed and controlled, and that the principal civil society partners of a left government should be "democratic civic organizations, in the community as well as the workplace...
...His book mentions the World Trade Organization (WTO) twice, treating it under the general heading of "global civil society" or "global governance...
...And he justifies this with an argument for "positive welfare"—a mode of public provision that, instead of simply offering a financial safety net for those in need, invests in "human capital" so that individuals can better navigate their own ways through economic risk and difficulty...
...but] the sources, and the scope, of risk have altered...
...On the basis of the theory of structuration, Giddens proceeded to develop an even more ambitious account of the evolution of modern society, articulated in a critical dialogue with Marxism...
...Put more accurately, the sorts of reactions they might evoke today are often as much about damage control and repair as about an endless process of increasing mastery...
...51-65...
...One major theme is that the state should engage in the "active promotion" of the self-organization of civil society, so that citizens can democratically work together to address the problems associated with the new capitalism...
...Now Giddens himself persistently blurs the distinction between his third way and Clinton/Blair's...
...There is thus a synergy between state provision, the opportunities and capacities available to individuals and families, and forms of solidarity and social service provision generated in civil society...
...Facing left, Giddens is very toughminded about what is possible: nothing more, he tells us, than the third way...
...In each instance, some aspect of the neoliberal regime is contested, and reforms, at the margins, may be instituted...
...He insists that today's primary public policy problem is not inequality but exclusion: "Exclusion is not about gradations of inequality, but about mechanisms that act to detach groups of people from the social mainstream...
...public schools, adult education, and job retraining and placement...
...It was abolished in 1986 by the Parliament under the Thatcher government...
...And in The Consequences of Modernity (1990), Giddens argued that modernity is distinguished not simply by the development of industrialism, capitalism, and bureaucracy, but, at a deeper level, by the chronic reflexivity of knowledge, the development of increasingly abstract social relationships, and the ceaseless and global transformation of society and nature...
...In other areas, his formulations actually represent a step backward...
...yet, while we cannot "seize hold" of this juggernaut, we can perhaps "steer" it in beneficial directions...
...cooperative and community businesses, as well as trade unions and voluntary organizations, not unaccountable concentrations of wealth...
...Such a politics depends on the building of active trust, whether in the institutions of government or in connected agencies...
...They indicate, he argued, the importance of what he called "generative politics...
...and new forms of public/private/philanthropic partnerships designed to renovate public space and rebuild the economic and social infrastructure of communities...
...Giddens underscored the interconnections and disparities between what Weber called class, status, and party...
...A similar problem emerges when Giddens talks about "positive welfare...
...As he wrote: "Generative politics is a. . . politics of the public domain, but does not situate itself in the old opposition between state and market...
...I N DEVELOPING these themes Giddens's writing came increasingly under the influence of Ulrich Beck, the German social theorist whose book The Risk Society treated ecological danger as the paradigm of a new, postindustrial form of "manufactured uncertainty...
...Community building initiatives concentrate upon the multiple problems individuals and families face, including job quality, health and child care, education and transport...
...Modern history, Giddens held (echoing Walter Benjamin), is like a "juggernaut," propelled by the unintended conse 62 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 quences of human empowerment...
...Giddens talks a great deal about the need for social democrats to acknowledge the danger of governmental "waste" and "inefficiency...
...In a series of books—New Rules of Sociological Method, Studies in Social and Political Theory, and Central Problems of Social Theory—he developed what came to be known as the "theory of structuration...
...Some have claimed that this marks a shift from Giddens's earlier insistence that radical politics today is "beyond left and right...
...Intellectual debate about such challenges, and about their limits, is indispensable...
...7. Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right (London: Blackwell, 1994...
...These structures exert a causal power on the conduct of social agents, something typically obscured by interpretivists...
...But the overheated rhetoric of "anticapitalist struggle" is unhelpful, intellectually or politically, if it is meant to imply anything more profound...
...For whatever he avoids and omits, he is generally right about what a renewed social democracy is capable of producing politically in the world today...
...For these critics the so-called third way is simply neoliberalism with a human face, all dressed up in a language of "post-ideological politics" that well suits New Age, sound-bite culture.' They see Giddens as a rationalizer at best, an apologist at worst, for such a humanized neoliberalism...
...But he says little about the extraordinary pay disparities between high level corporate man 66 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 agers and ordinary employees and the widening gap between rich and poor in advanced capitalist societies—which are questionable on ethical grounds but also on grounds of efficiency...
...And it undermines the heroic imagery of anticapitalist struggle that has long nourished segments of the left...
...new forms of public education, including charter schools...
...THE "THIRD WAY" iS the subject of countless articles, op-ed columns, policy papers, international conferences, and the public pronouncements by heads of state from Bill Clinton to Gerhard Schroeder to Tony Blair...
...in New Left Review 2 (March/April 2000...
...Giddens did not romanticize these developments, but he considered them facts of life...
...The Third Way The Third Way is subtitled The Renewal of Social Democracy...
...The rethinking that Giddens supports has, as he says, already begun, and the point of his book is to engage and deepen this discussion...
...While he maintains that "third way politics as a matter of principle must not be complacent or collusive in the face of power," and insists that "left of center governments mustn't shirk confronting corporate interests where it is necessary to do so—and it often is necessary to do so," he repeatedly disparages "anti-corporate" rhetoric and offers virtually no discussion of the kinds of "confrontation" he alludes to...
...Perhaps it isn't possible to return to the taxation strategies that preceded the neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher...
...It is not that he is an apologist for flexible accumulation, wedded to an uncritical conception of individualism, as some critics have assertedi° for he does register the serious challenges of globalization and flexibility, and he also supports forms of solidarity that offset the effects of both...
...His New Left critics offer a broader range of alternative futures, and they rightly see that political pressure is necessary to keep third-way liberalism honest...
...THE FIRST TWO chapters of the book seek to prove that classical socialism—and especially classical social democracy, epitomized by the postwar, Keynesian social contract—is outmoded...
...There must be something solid behind the hype, otherwise the public will see through the facade pretty quickly...
...Ulrich Beck, Democracy Without Enemies (London: Polity Press, 1998), pp...
...I am thus wary of the harsh denunciations of Giddens for saying what many on the left privately acknowledge—that the political terrain has irremediably shifted in ways that have weakened the "historical project" of the left...
...Second, social democratic parties have themselves begun this rethinking, as indicated by the British Labour Party's Policy Review of 1987...
...All countries have pulled back from such a practice...
...2. On this, see John Westergaard, 'Where Does the Third Way Lead...
...Consequences offered little by way of programmatic politics, but it broached themes that would soon become central to Giddens's program: reflexivity, risk, and the unintended consequences of social engineering...
...For if his arguments are not reducible to the Clinton/ Blair agenda, some of them have nonetheless given cover to some of the more regrettable aspects of Clinton/Blair, most important the abandonment of working-class and poor constituencies in order to capture the middle-class center, the embrace of global free trade, and an emphasis upon "modernization" that often amounts to little more than a depoliticizing glorification of third-wave technologies.' With regard to these matters, it is legitimate to wonder whether what is being defended is a renewal or a repudiation of social democracy.' It is notable that The Third Way contains no index entries for unions, trade unions, or working class...
...This synthetic effort highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of Marx's class analysis, Durkheim's analysis of social symbols and religious forms, and Weber's account of rationalization and bureaucracy...
...At the same time, new social movements have emerged that defy the "totalizing" logic of the project of socialist transformation...
...First, there has been a dramatic shift in the "structures of political support" for the left, due to the decline in numbers and cultural significance of the blue-collar, industrial working class and to the emergence of new constituencies and new postindustrial issues regarding gender and sexuality, ecology, peace and human rights, and lifestyle...
...He has nothing to say about redressing the declining power of worker organizations...
...THE POLICIES Giddens endorses are versions of the policies pioneered by Blair and Clinton...
...And, disturbingly, what was supposed to create greater and greater certainty—the advance of human knowledge and "controlled intervention" into society and nature—is actually deeply involved with this unpredictability . . . Life has always been a risky business...
...Risk and danger are associated with modernity, according to Giddens, but there is also the promise of freedom and prosperity...
...And, above all, it is honest...
...tax credits to support the formation of third-sector associations, philanthropies, and service agencies...
...But it also marks the limits of the state-centered public policy and instrumental rationality at the heart of classical left politics, whether revolutionary or social democratic...
...Third, there exist novel political-economic conditions associated with globalization...
...and efforts to absorb surplus labor by encouraging and financially rewarding "volunteer" activity in third-sector organizations (Giddens's ideas here mirror the more extensive proposals developed by Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work...
...For if we live in a "runaway world," overtaken by complex forces beyond our collective control, then there is no reason to be sanguine and every reason to be suspicious of those with power...
...Third, and most fatefully from the standpoint of its critics, it forswears a wholesale opposition to capitalism and embraces domestic and global markets as price-setting institutions and as engines of technological advance and economic growth...
...For her, the third way employs "a discourse from an honorable new left tradition (from E. P. Thompson to Ken Livingstone . . .) to legitimate policies which take the line of least resistance to those with wealth and power...
...Yet, differences of emphasis and tone notwithstanding, the book is consistent with his earlier arguments...
...But if Giddens's argument is flawed, it is nonetheless true that the "accommodation" he endorses does not rest on some failure of nerve on his part...
...Indeed, as Giddens concludes his book, "image alone isn't enough...
...If all New Labour had to offer were media savvy, its time on the political stage would be short, and its contribution to the revival of social democracy limited...
...portability of individual pensions...
...He offered an analysis of new social forces associated with globalization and the new communications technologies...
...Events, Giddens held, have not borne out the socialist aspiration to supplant capitalism with a more just and "rational" social order...
...in The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000, forthcoming...
...the director of the London School of Economics...
...the limits of conventional welfare state forms of "social security" and redistribution...
...Although Giddens offers a cogent account of the decline of the postwar social democratic coalition—and although he indicates the importance of new lines of cleavage— he says little about the salience of different forms of contestation, whether these are class conflicts, conflicts associated with "new social movements," or conflicts fueled by ethnic, racial, and sexual resentments...
...they are too powerful...
...9 There is much common ground here, but also significant differences of emphasis, with Giddens leaning toward Blair and New Labour's effort to promote a nonadversarial relationship with capital, and Wainwright leaning toward Blair's New Left critics...
...Similarly, the only indexed reference to unions is a remark about the importance of collaborative corporate/ union labor relations...
...but neither do they respond to the Enlightenment prescription of more knowledge, more control...
...He is surely correct to insist that the problem of inequality is not reducible to disparities of income or wealth...
...The task of thirdway politics, then, is neither to stop nor to master the forces of globalization, but to contain them and to insulate vulnerable social groups from their most harmful effects, thereby freeing individuals to pursue their potential benefits...
...According to Beck, ecological politics presents novel challenges associated with risk management and the dangers of environmental devastation, and novel possibilities associated with new social movements, new forms of public deliberation, and an emergent "sub-politics" located in civil society...
...But he sought with considerable success to develop a view of society consistent with the reality of power and the possibility of conscious social change...
...It offers little inspiration for activists, who would certainly DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 69 prefer a more buoyant and heroic rhetoric of opposition...
...On social democratic partyism, see also John Keane, Democracy and tually present themselves...
...He thus supports universal health care...
...This is not to say that Giddens repudiates the labor movement or offers a blanket endorsement of the existing regime of free trade...
...Policies that attack these two head on are likely to leave other forms of inequality intact...
...the 1991 rebirth of the Italian Communist Party as the Democratic Party of the Left...
...First, his third way is the product not of political myopia or opportunism, but of a serious and in some ways exemplary intellectual trajectory...
...His concluding chapter identified violence and dangers to ecology as the principal challenges confronting critical theory today...
...If by "anticapitalist struggle" we mean efforts to overcome specific injustices, such as sweatshop labor or the unchecked mobility of capital, then such efforts are surely worthy, and it makes sense to press them forward and radicalize third-way public policies...
...On this score, Giddens is closer to the truth 68 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 than his most penetrating critics...
...Furthermore, the policies he outlines hardly constitute an uncritical acceptance of capitalism as it currently operates...
...and yet they are also sustained or altered by such conduct, having no independent reality apart from their social production and reproduction...
...But his discussions often proceed at a level of generality in which these important and contentious issues get lost...
...Then, in The Nation-State and Violence (1987), Giddens went further, focusing on the problems of power and violence in twentiethcentury political life...
...the Guardian (Saturday, May 23, 1998), p. 1. 10...
...7-21...
...the campaign against sweatshop labor is another...
...Penetrating social analysis is necessary, but also a tragic sensibility, at home on the margins of the system, challenging particular injustices, pursuing creative policy responses in the absence of either a totalizing alternative or an oppositional mass politics...
...and the emergence of new political sensibilities and repertoires of action associated with an emphasis on civil society...
...5. See Perry Anderson, "Comment: Power, Politics, and the Enlightenment," in David Miliband, ed., Reinventing the Left (London: Polity Press, 1994), and Chantal Mouffe, "A Politics Without Adversary...
...Whatever its flaws, this is more than an electoral tactic or a post hoc rationale for Blair's government...
...new forms of production and consumption made possible by third-wave technologies associated with global communication...
...In the course of the debate, Wainwright expressed sympathy for Giddens's call for "experimenting with non-orthodox forms of democratic participation," but worried that this language was "a smokescreen for a very different practice...
...For Beck, ecological politics symbolizes the emergence of a more skeptical politics in which grandiose transformative or even remedial ambitions are abandoned...
...But he says much too little about just how challenging globalization and flexibility are to the values he holds...
...Indeed, his entire discussion conflates criticism of his own arguments and criticism of the policies associated with Clinton and Blair, as if he can't see any difference between his arguments as a social theorist and the policy and propaganda of their governments...
...This is a revealing formulation...
...And Giddens explicitly distances himself from Blair when he observes, for example, that "education and training have become the new mantra for social democratic politicians...
...Second, it rejects a class-based politics, whether this be Marxism or the more conventional social democracy of Old Labour, in favor of a more complicated and ideologically inclusive politics of the so-called "active middle" or "radical center" (Giddens also uses the term "center left"—all these terms are used interchangeably and without much precision...
...Soundings has run a series of brilliant articles and editorials on these themes...
...Here Giddens draws upon a vast literature that documents the rise of a "post-Fordist" regime of flexible accumulation and flexible labor markets...
...and a member of Tony Blair's inner circle of advisers...
...Second, Giddens's argument about the third way—as distinct from various slogans and position papers produced by party ideologists and policy wonks—is a plausible account of democratic left politics, not reducible to the policy rationalizations regularly peddled by Blair and Clinton propagandists...
...the organization of community policing...
...See especially Michael Rustin's "A Third Way With Teeth," Soundings 11 (Spring 1999), pp...
...it is a set of challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed in a new way...
...The most troubling aspect of Giddens's argument is not the new thinking he seeks to promote, his experimental approach toward public/ private collaborations, or even his claim that "no one has any alternatives to capitalism...
...They cannot be dealt with by ageold remedies...
...See my response, "Intellectuals, Marxism, and Politics," and Callinicos's rejoinder, "Impossible Anticapitalism...
...He has received encomiums from the likes of Blair, Romano Prodi, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...This is the central theme of Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (1994), in which Giddens telegraphed the themes associated with his third-way idea...
...and second, because such arrangements are no longer sustainable, having been politically delegitimized and economically overtaken by the new forces of globalization...
...First, it is eclectic and synthetic, reappropriating certain classically conservative themes: the need to repair damaged solidarities, the ethical and political importance of intermediate associations, and the limits of state policy...
...And here there is no reason to remain wedded to Giddens's formulations...
...And implicit in this account was a view of sociological reason as a critical faculty...
...For while they correctly discern the limitations of the third way, they are too credulous about the possibilities of moving beyond them...
...This state of affairs, which few on the left would deny, is what makes necessary new thinking...
...But it provides no sustained analysis of this organization and its devaluation of labor, or of the emergence of political movements challenging it, or of ways of reforming or constraining world trade or the global economy generally...
...Nonetheless, inequalities of income and wealth are crucial features of the capitalist societies in which we live, and Giddens has to say more than he does about the relation between them and "exclusion" more generally...
...The parallels with Habermas are obvious, though Giddens's work has always lacked Habermas's philosophical ambition...
...Hilary Wainwright offers another useful contrast, both in her Arguments fora New Left' and in a debate with Giddens published in 1998 in the London Guardian...
...Some of Giddens's critics have argued that his third way represents an accommodation to, if not a glorification of, the status quo...
...the Norwegian Labor Party's "Freedom Debate" of 1986-1988...
...3 (November 1999...
...and new forms of global finance and speculation that, combined with the new communications technologies, make possible instantaneous currency flows, rendering the fiscal and monetary policies of nation-states virtually powerless...
...His latest book is Democracy in Dark Times...
...So Giddens supports government subsidies for community development corporations and banks, urban enterprise zones, and local small business...
...His efforts have not gone unrewarded...
...And third, this argument is deeply flawed: it is insufficiently attentive to questions of power and insufficiently critical of what a politics of "the center" is capable of achieving...
...The Third Way Reconsidered Sidney Blumenthal, erstwhile Clintonite, has described the third way as "the practical experience of two leading politicians [Clinton and Blair] who win elections, operate in the real world, and understand the need, in a global economy, to find common solutions for common problems...
...Leaving people mired in benefits tends to exclude them from the larger society...
...On the one hand, he rejects the neoliberal program of state retrenchment and unconditional global free trade...
...In these respects Giddens's third way is a variation on familiar social democratic themes...
...It works through providing material conditions, and organizational frameworks, for the life-political decisions taken by individuals and groups in the wider social order...
...generative politics is the main means of effectively approaching problems of poverty and social exclusion in the present day" Here are the central themes of Giddens's third way...
...8. The Greater London Council was the short-lived form of London municipal government that sought, under the leadership of Ken Livingstone from 1982-1986, to work with new social movements on the left to promote, a more egalitarian public policy in London...
...Recent demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund and the WTO are instances of this...
...He is more emphatic in his defense of fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets...
...His central insight was that social life consists of numerous "social structures" that are both the conditions of and the (typically unintended) outcome of ordinary social interaction...
...Political insurgencies are surely possible at the margins of the politicaleconomic system...
...He persuasively recapitulates many of the points I have summarized, but his responses to critics tend toward the formulaic, reinforcing the sense that Giddens's principal interlocutors are no longer his fellow left intellectuals but the politicians—Blair, Prodi, Cardoso—who blurb the book...
...The Third Way is an effort to argue on behalf of something deeper, a "substantive agenda" that is still a work in progress...
...The author wishes to thank the following for their comments on versions of this essay: Purnima Bose, Mitchell Cohen, Jeff Gould, Bob Ivie, Denny James, Tony Judt, Chantal Mouffe, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Michael Walzer, and Jeff Wasserstrom...
...THESE ANALYTICAL weaknesses are accentuated rather than mitigated in Giddens's most recent book, The Third Way and its Critics, where he purports to respond to critics of his third-way arguments...
...and the policy debates within the German Social Democratic Party, leading to its new Basic Program of 1989...
...And yet Giddens clearly does seek to realize conventional left ideals of democratic equality and social justice, to limit the inequities associated with capitalist markets, and to develop shock absorbers for the fluctuations caused by market forces, particularly financial globalization and currency speculation...
...Such policies build social capital, he argues, and promote democratic participation and legitimacy, which makes them preferable to either marketbased or statist solutions...
...4. Here, again, see Joanne Barkan's critique...
...Fighting poverty, he insists, "requires an injection of economic resources, but applied to support local initiative...
...6. See Anthony King, "Legitimating Post-Fordism: A Critique of Anthony Giddens's Later Works," Telos 115 (Spring 1999), pp...
...His 1971 Capitalism and Social Theory was one of the first major works in Anglo-American social science to go beyond the formalism of Parsonian DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 61 sociology to construct a fruitful conversation among the three "founders" of "classical sociology"— Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber...
...Yet while he emphasizes the importance of public support for civil society initiatives, he also defends the concept of a "social investment state" that backs up such initiatives with forms of universal provision...
...3. See Geoff Andrews, "New Left and New Labour: Modernisation or a New Modernity...
...Indeed, the most serious critiques of Blairism and also of the third way are to be found in the pages of British New Left journals: Soundings, New Left Review, and Wainwright's own Red Pepper . 1° Here one finds an attention to corporate power and to the challenges of left movementbuilding that is largely absent from Giddens's texts, which fail to pose hard questions and are too sanguine about the promise of New Labour...
...What it means is that neoliberalism has been successful in attacking progressive taxation...
...Following Beck, Giddens emphasizes that the modes of "reflexivity" and constant readjustment engendered by post-Fordist capitalism promote new forms of individualism and mobility that shape human identities for good and ill (on this, see also Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character...
...These forces, Giddens insists, cannot be stopped...
...In A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981), he argued against the most sophisticated efforts to reconstruct historical materialism, criticizing Marxism as a reductionist theory of society, and seeking to incorporate Marxian insights within a more pluralistic view of the sources of social division...
...And it is too nuanced, too ambivalent, to gain a hearing in the melodramatic world of postmodern publicity, a world of simplicities, slogans, and celebrities...
...Giddens doesn't lay out a comprehensive agenda, but indicates the policies that thirdwayers should pursue...
...Giddens emphasizes that the third way is a project of the democratic left rather than of neoliberalism or conservatism, yet it is beyond left and right as these have typiDISSENT / Spring 2001 n 63cally been understood...
...Perhaps the most widely quoted—and widely disparaged—passage in the book is Giddens's assertion that "no one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism...
...These themes were developed, in a more empirical vein, in Giddens's 1973 The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies...
...61-78...
...I am skeptical of this criticism, not because I believe that the third way represents the riddle of history solved or because I believe that Giddens's particular formulations are beyond reproach, but because I am doubtful of the supposedly more authentic left or social democratic alternatives that many of the critics take for granted...
...Echoes of the Frankfurt School are obvious here, but Giddens did not simply rehash pieties about the limits of technique...
...But I am also wary of Giddens himself, for he seems in the name of modernization to have embraced developments that ought not to be embraced and to attribute to the new dispensation unrealistic possibilities for human advancement...
...But he also emphasizes 64 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 the instability and insecurity inscribed within this system...
...The world we live in today is not one subject to tight human mastery—the stuff of the ambitions of the left and, one could say, the nightmares of the right...
...Bauman offers a sustained description of the economic, demographic, and political dark sides of globalization, the interpenetration of mobility and forcible displaceDISSENT / Spring 2001 n 67 ment, the asymmetry between the opportunities available in advanced societies and the utter abjection of so much of the rest of humanity, and the reinforcing effects of globalized markets and technologies on the one hand, and political fundamentalism on the other...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
