A Reply to My Critics

Anthony Giddens

Perhaps it would be useful if, before addressing some of the issues raised by the various
contributors to this symposium, I set out very briefly what I see as some of the principal
objectives of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (CCHM). The title of the book is
probably a little misleading. It is not concerned with a textual exegesis and criticism of whatever
there is to be found in Marx’s writings relevant to his ’materialist conception of history’. Rather
the book is an attempt to develop a critical appropriation of what I see as certain key aspects of
Marx’s ideas - but in the context of a theoretical scheme which in other respects diverges sharply
from some of the views that ordinarily pass as ’Marxism’. Insofar as the book is concerned with
Marx, it represents what I would call a ’deconstruction’ of historical materialism. Unlike
Habermas, and Marxists of various shades and hues, I do not think it feasible to produce a
’reconstruction’ of historical materialism. That is to say, I do not think it possible to produce a
version of the materialist conception of history which subjects it to some sort of general
overhaul, while keeping the main mechanism of the engine intact. (Although, Habermas’s views,
as I shall mention later, really depart a long way from those of Marx.) In Introducing the
neologisms of ’episodic characterisations’, ’time-space edges’ and so on, I did not intend to put
forward a conception of history which has the same form as that which Marx advanced (when
writing in an evolutionary vein, at least). There is no key to unlocking the secret doors of social
change, no master-theory of the universal conditions of societal transformation; and human
history cannot be compressed into evolutionary schemes.
My approach in the book is based upon a discontinuist view of modern history. By this I do not
refer to the conventional Marxian notion that social development proceeds via a series of
revolutionary transformations between different types of society. Such as notion is integral to
Marx’s evolutionism; I do not mean by ’evolutionism’ only those schemes that hold that the
movement from simple to more complex forms of society takes place in a gradual fashion. I have
in mind the discontinuity - or series of overlapping transformations of social life - which
separates our world from anything that went before. Over the course of something like three
hundred years, beginning in the West, global society has been transformed in ways which simply
have no precedent in prior history - whatever continuities may exist with what went before.
Reading a good deal of archaeology, as I did in preparation for writing this book, was for me an
illuminating experience. Most social analyses, I think, operate with a truncated time-sense. They
may know a certain amount about the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, and
perhaps about non-European imperial states, such as traditional China. But the history of
’civilisations’ goes back some seven thousand years, and if one includes lesser-known culture
areas (to sociologists), such as meso-America, embraces very many societies. The advent of
civilisations, or what I call class-divided societies, certainly marked a major break with the
smaller societies in which human beings have been clustered for a very much longer period,
amounting to tens of thousands of years. But no ’breaks’ in history compared with the massive
transformations brought about - on a world scale - in a period which, in the scale of historical
time, is very tiny indeed.
Marx’s writings, I tried to show, can be pressed into the service of a discontinuist conception of
modern history: indeed, understood In a specific way they are crucial to such a conception. But
they are at the same time deficient both substantively’and methodologically. However prescient

THEORY
CULTURE&
~oc/Ery
SOCIETY

107
Marx may have been in certain respects, I think that the world in which we live today is in other
ways quite different from that which he, and most other nineteenth-century thinkers anticipated.
The traditions of thought which dominate the social sciences today, both inside and outside
Marxism, tend to be strongly indebted to their nineteenth-century origins. Problems in the theory
of the state exemplify this. Even those who are most sympathetic to Marxism today accept that
Marx failed to develop any more than the rudiments of an interpretation of the modern state. The
considerable volume of recent writings by Marxists on the state continues to be preoccupied with
the role of the state in economic life, or with the state as an agent of ’internal’ repression. We live
in a world nation-state system which is part of the schism between modern history and what went
before. But both ’classical’ and contemporary Marxist thought (as Poulantzas, in his last book,
State, Power and Socialism candidly admitted) lacks a theory of the nation-state, the nation-state
system, and of nationalism.
Much the same is true, however, as I indicated in CCHM, of liberal political theory. Liberal
thinkers, such as TH Marshall, or Bendix, have written about the nation-state and nationalism.
According to their analyses, the rise of the nation-state - and phenomena of ’nation-building’ -

are closely connected with the development of ’citizenship&dquo; and mass democracy. But as we can
see from Marshall’s little classic, Citizenship and Social Class, and from Bendix’s most recent
and important work, Kings or People, their attention has above all been focussed upon
constitutional law and ’citizenship rights’. The nation-state appears as the ’political community’
within which citizenship rights may be reallsed, not as part of the global nation-state system - a
world in which a fragile equality in weaponry on the part of the two most powerful states militarily
is the main brake on the political anarchy of a terrifyingly new international order. In order to
associate the state with violence and territoriality, we have to turn to other sources, such as
Hintze or Max Weber. But even in these authors we do not find a satisfactory treatment of either
nation-states or of nationalism. This is partly because they defined ’the state’ in general in such a
way that it is difficult to pick up the specific significance of the modern nation-state system.

I do not of course pretend in CCHM to have offered anything more than an outline framework for
analysing these issues. I do think, however, that my concern to provide a generalised account of
time-space relations, within the context of the theory of structuration, is fundamental on a
substantive as well as a methodological level. Among the extraordinary features of the modern
world are the novel forms of interpretation of presence and absence in the constitution of social
life. To group the connections between the vast lateral extension of human social relations on a
world scale, on the one hand, and the transformation of the most personal features of ’everyday
life’, on the other, seems to be a necessary task of social theory. I have tried to show
methodologically that social theory has as its most basic task the theorising of the ’binding’ of
time-space; and that substantively this approach points up rather clearly the pivotal significance
of urbanism in contrasting class-divided with capitalist societies. Here Marx’s identification of
the essential features of capitalist enterprise is of basic importance. The commodification of
extensional space, I think, underlies modern urbanism, and is in turn dependent upon the
commodification of time. Time as abstract quantity, rationalised and measurable is, as Marx
shows, at the very heart of the class relations inherent in capitalistic enterprise. Marx and
Mumford might seem odd bedfellows, but here there is a real and important convergence in their
analysis of the technological dynamics of modern industry - with implications that stretch well
beyond conventional debates about Marxist value theory. A main strand of my arguments In the
book is the attempt to demonstrate that the commodification of time-space, the specific
character of capitalistic enterprise, and the consolidation of the means of violence in the hands
of nation-states, can be theorised in conjunction with one-another. Although this is only set out
in a schematic way in CCHM, I shall flesh out the details considerably in the volume which will
follow it.
I hope these considerations shed some light upon some of the puzzles or shortcomings which the
reviewers have discerned in the book, because there is not room enough in this brief commentary
to reply to all the objections raised. It is usually a source of some comfort to an author, I think, to
be criticised in contrary ways by different reviewers - one tends to feel that one has hit some mark
or other. Thus, for example, while Hirst declares the critique of evolutionism and functionalism

108
as something to be taken for granted, Ashley chides me for departing too far from an evolutionary
theory without examining evolutionism in sufficient detail. Hirst holds that what I have to say is
too ’syncretic and eclectic’, while according to Smith I ’reveal a powerful drive towards
,onceptual closure’, and am apparently not eclectic enough, since I do not want to tolerate a
diversity of approaches as equally useful. One reviewer thinks I deserve some credit for raising
problems of time-space analysis, while another holds that such matters are already well covered
In the existing literature of social theory and so on.
...

Let me begin with the question of time-space analysis, which I take to be fundamental to the
notion of structuration as I have tried to elaborate it in various recent writings in addition to
CCHM. Hirst is one reviewer who seems to find it rather uninteresting, and at the same time
conceptually suspect. He is particularly scornful of my use of ideas adopted from Heidegger. As I
pointed out In CCHM, I have no particular sympathy with certain major features of Heidegger’s
views, but I do regard Being and Time, together with the discussions of temporality and presence
In Heidegger’s later writings, as among the greatest achievements of modern philosophy - and as
essential resources for ideas I have sought to put forward. Hirst’s remarks about Heidegger, and
the criticisms he bases on them, seem to me quite mistaken - both as a characterisation of
Heidegger’s philosophy and as a logically feasible interpretation of temporality. Hirst remarks
that ’Heidegger’s time is always time for a subject’, for an experiencing individual. But this is an
elementary misunderstanding. The whole point of Heidegger’s philosophy is to separate out the
finitude of Dasoin from the constitutive temporality of the object-world. Heidegger’s critique of
’philosophies of the subject’, and of epistemology has directly, not just negatively, influenced the
figures Hirst obviously admires - Althusser, Derrida and Lacan.
Gross’s comments on time-space relations are more interesting and challenging. He summarlses
most of the relevant parts of CCHM accurately, but does misrepresent my views rather seriously
In one respect. I do not argue, as he says (p 85) that ’In place of traditional time we now have what
appears to be three intersecting time senses in modern society’. The three aspects of temporality
he refers to I regard as constitutive components of the structuration of all forms of social system,
traditional and modern alike. The dur6o of social life, the temporality of the life-cycle of the
human being, and the longue dur6o of Institutions are in my conception three intersecting
moments of social interaction. This apart, Gross seems to concur with the critical attacks I have
made against structuralism and functionalism, and with at least some of the directions of
thought I have tried to follow. There is also, in a certain sense, a greater measure of agreement
between Gross and myself about the commodification of time-space than he believes. For I think
the separation of ’time’ and ’space’, as extensional categories of experience, is a distinctive
feature of Western philosophy since Kant and, in specifiable ways, part of everyday social life
also. I find it a little difficult to assess Gross’s own views since they seem to me rather obscurely
expressed. Insofar as he wants to argue that the experience of dur6o as the routinisation of daily
life is now substantially disconnected from an experimental grounding in the longue dur6a of
institutional time, I agree with him. I did not try to pursue the Implications of this In the book, but I
think that, contrary to what might be Imagined, given the prevalence of homogeneous time-sense
through the co-ordination of ’clock time’, temporal experience now becomes a mol6o of
disconnected experiences. It seems to me much too simple, however, to claim that’the temporal
dimension’ has become appropriated by the state -
whatever that might turn out to mean.
The notion of the ’duality of structure’, as Urry quite rightly points out, is basic to the theory of
structuration, and hence to time-space analysis. I am not really happy with the idea that there is a
’structurationist school’ in sociology: if there are definitely affinities between my position and
those of Bhaskar and Bourdieu, I feel remote from most of the ideas espoused by Touraine.
However that may be, Urry expresses the key elements in my methodological views In a succinct
and sympathetic fashion. According to the idea of the duality of structure, structure is both
medium and outcome of the activities whereby actors knowledgeably reproduce social life in the
course of daily social encounters. The conception of structuration seeks to give full due to the
’knowledgeability’ of lay actors, without entailing any form of subjectivism. Contrary to what
Hirst says towards the end of his review, my critique of Althusser, and of the ’post-structuralists’,
has never involved the crude assertion that ’Althusser and those influenced by him neglect

109
&dquo;human agency&dquo; (p 82). I regard it as necessary to ’de-centre the subject’ in the sense of refusing
to accept ’subjectivity’ or ’agency’ ass given qualities of human beings. I fully agree that the
relevant question to ask is ’how it is possible for men (sic) to function as agents’. But I think that
the answers proffered by Althusser, and by the ’post-structuralists’ are deficient. In large part,
this is because practical consciousness, as routinely but reflexively applied in the chronic
constitution and reconstitution of social life, remains untheorised - human beings then do
indeed appear as ’cultural dopes’, much as they do in Parsonfan theory also.

In spite of his manifest sympathy for the theory of structuration, Urry develops two major
criticisms. ’Little attention’, he says, ’is paid to how structures do generate social systems’; and
’social struggles, as one class of acts, are relatively unexplored’ (p 102). I think these criticisms
are partly justified, although I do not see them as providing serious sources of difficulty for the
general framework I try to establish - they are rather a stimulus to further elaboration. The first
problem he raises, as he says himself, can only be satisfactorily approached in the context of
empirical Issues. I have at least made an attempt along these lines in sections of CCHM. Insofar
as ’societies’ can be treated as ’totalities’ -
Itself in some degree an empirical issue because of
the difficulties of drawing ’boundaries’ between social systems - this is because of identifiable
clusterings of institutions across space and time. Structures, in my terminology at any rate, are
always ’structuring properties’ of social systems: the transformation/mediation relations
whereby institutions are embedded in time and space. The most fundamental of such properties
are those which I call ’structural principles’, and refer to the modalities of reproduction of
societal totalities. In CCHM I indicate the structural principles Implicated in three overall types of
societal totality -

non-state, class-divided and capitalist societies. So far as the second

question - that of struggle goes, I also offer various connected concepts that certainly relate
-

to contradiction and conflict. While I do not think, as Urry appears to claim, that this creates
difficulties for the notion of the duality of structure, I accept that I have not elaborated patterns
of unintended consequences in the manner he wishes to do. I agree that this is an important task,
and one to which he makes an interesting contribution. But I think his discussion might be
improved if he didn’t treat ’struggle’ as a sort of generic concept, which needs no further
specification.
Ashley’s review is primarily concerned to defend historical materialism as an evolutionary
scheme. Unlike Hirst (correctly, in my view), Ashley emphasises the centrality of evolutionism to
Marxist thought. The statement that ’if the idea of social evolutionism is ripped away from
Marxism and from historical materialism, what is left is so mutilated as to be almost
unrecognisable’ is perhaps a little extreme. But there is no doubt that a repudiation of
evolutionary theory, and the rejection of any form of ’universal history’, demands a basic re-
thinking of Marxism as both an analytical doctrine and a foundation for political action. I think
such a re-thinking is one of the most exigent tasks facing us today, while Ashley does not.
Ashley’s argument, however, appears to take an odd twist. For he opens his discussion as though
he were going to defend the materialist conception of history as Marx formulated it. But it turns
out that he wishes to advocate the kind of ’reconstructed’ version of historical materialism
proffered by Habermas. Habermas’s interpretation of historical materialism, as I indicated
toward the beginning of this article, might want to preserve a similar overall form to Marx’s
conception, but its substance is in some ways quite different. Habermas does not sustain the
idea that contradictions between the forces and the relations of production are the motor of
historical development. In fact, in tandem with Luhmann, he specifically separates out his
scheme of evolution from ’history’. It is not an explanatory scheme, but a basis for a ’rational
reconstruction’ of phases of societal development. I doubt, in fact, whether Marx would have had
much truck with a presentation of the materialist conception of history reformulated in terms of
’the logic of normative development’. But whatever he might have thought, in my opinion there
are fundamental objections that can be brought against Habermas’s conception of evolution,
which I regard as one of the least persuasive aspects of his writings. There seems little point in
detailing these objections here, although I have discussed some of them elsewhere (in a review
article on Habermas’s recent Theorle des kommunikativen Handoins, forthcoming in the next
Issue of the journal Praxis International).

110
Smith’s review strikes me as the most penetrating and provocative of the contributions to the
symposium, and I shall discuss it in somewhat more detail than the others. I don’t think there Is
any such thing as ’historical sociology’, although he uses the term. One of the implications of the
theory of structuratlon, in my opinion, is that any divisions that might be claimed to separate
history and sociology become dissolved. There Is no branch of sociology that can be called
’historical sociology’, separated from other ’fields’ of sociological Interest. This having been
said, however, I think Smith Is entirely right to call attention to the works he mentions at the
beginning of his review. Together with the rise of what Stone and others have referred to as the
’new history’, they mark a substantial reorientation of sociological concerns over the past few
years. Philip Abrams produced important discussions of these matters just before his untimely
death, and I am pleased that as Smith points out - Abrams saw in the theory of structuratlon
-

a direct parallel with his ’manifesto for a new time -centred enterprise’. Smith himself hedges his
bets a bit on this, preferring what he sees as the more ’open-ended’ approach of Barrington
Moore to my more nebulous excursions into ’the theoretical stratosphere’. But the nub of his
critical comments is to do what he discerns as limitations in some of the generalisatfons I make
In CCHM about class-divided societies. Some of his remarks here connect with comments made
by Hirst.
As Smith says, and as I have mentioned earlier, in CCHM I make a case for the claim that the
theory of the city is of essential importance to the characterisation of class-divided societies
(and to capitalist societies also). It is this claim which he sets out to criticise, basing his
argument mainly upon his account of European absolutism. Since it is rather basic to what he
regards as errors for which he takes me to task, I have to emphasise that there is a
misinterpretation in his description of my arguments. He is right to say that, in my view, ’Cities
are... a precondition for the existence of both the state and classes in class-divided societies’ (p
94). But I do not hold that it is necessarily true that ’the dominant class is located in the city’ in
class-divided societies. My view is not so unsubtle as this. What I argue, in fact, is that cities, In
relation to the countryside, give basic structural form to such societies. Cities are ’power
containers’ crucial to the ’storage’ of authoritative resources, but the relations between urban
organisations, the state, and classes, vary considerably between different types of class-divided
society. I do not argue that ’surplus product Is extracted from rural labour by a dominant urban
class’ (p 95). I do not, as Smith claims, overlook differences between class-divided societies In
meso-America, Asia and Europe - although of course I make no clairri to analyse such
differences out In any detail. I hope it is clear that to seek to do so was not possible within the
compass of the book.For what it’s worth, I do not find compelling the differentiation between
’horticultural’ and ’agrarian’ societies to which Smith refers. Fixed systems of land tenure do not
correlate cleanly with this sort of economic typology as he seems to believe. But perhaps I should
stress that I had no intention of denying that forms of land tenure are of major significance in the
construction of class-divided societies, or that land-owning classes could come Into opposition
with state officialdom. I might perhaps have expressed myself too cursorily in the relevant
sections of CCHM. But I specifically Introduce the term ‘class-divided society’ in order to
separate my analysis from those who hold that, in non-capitalist state societies, the state
officialdom are lpso facto the single and sovereign ’dominant class’.

The detail of Smith’s discussion, however, concerns the interpretation of European absolutism.
Few questions have so divided historians as those of the nature and origins of absolutist states
in Europe. Before commenting on what Smith has to say, let me again refer back to my main alms
in CCHM, as I set them out in the first paragraphs of this article. It would obviously be impossible
in such a book to discuss at length the controversies about absolutism. I was, and am, less
interested in absolutism as a phenomenon than the generalised significance of the European
state-system as the nexus of development of capitalism. As In other sections of the book,
moreover, I steer clear of questions of ’origins’, concentrating upon the consequences of societal
transformation. I have considerable sympathy with the view, mentioned by Smith on (p 96) of his
review, that the ’absolutist claims’ of European princes ’were a kind of radical propaganda
directed against the powerful reserves of legitimacy and influence vested in the religions and
feudal spheres’. As I point out In the book, such claims hardly matched up to the real degree of

111
control exerted by absolutist rulers, which was limited by a range of factors (much the same Is
true of the’Orientai despots’ identified by Englightenment authors). I hope I have made clear that
my overall characterisation of class-divided societies in no way precludes the existence of
conflicts and alliances which cross-cut the differentiations between city and countryside. Most
of Smith’s discussion of such conflicts and allegiances in the post-feudal period in Europe is
plausible, although of course also debatable. Although I may not have expressed myself clearly
enough in CCHM, I do not feel that the statement from one of my earlier books which Smith
quotes on (p 98), concerning the persistence of land-owning groups within the class systems of
many capitalist societies is inconsistent with my current views. In what sense such groups
remained ’aristocracies’, and what the ’aristocracy’, ’gentry’, ’bourgeoisie’ etc. were in earlier
periods, raises issues which could be discussed - and certainly have been discussed - in the
literature almost ad nauseam.
There is one point, however, which I wish to insist upon very strongly, since it is vital to my
arguments in CCHM. This is the significance of the’extrusion’ of control of the means of violence
from the axial class relation of modern capitalism, the relation of capital to wage-labour. in my
opinion, in conjunction with the expansion of surveillance internally, and the consolidation of the
means of waging war externally, such a process of ’extrusion’ is fundamental to the liberal-
democratic state. Smith does not directly comment on this theorem, but Hirst offers some critical
observations about it. I have strong reservations about the style of analysis, and the substantive
claims, made in his and Hindess’s Pro-Capitalist Modes of Production. They make their case for
the ’separation’ of the direct labourer from the means of ’production’ in non-capitalist systems
partly on the basis of what is ’necessary’ to render Marx’s discourse Internally coherent. I have
little sympathy with this sort of procedure; and I think that in their book they concentrate too
much on economic mechanisms of exploitation, to the detriment of their understanding of
political domination. For me the theorisation of the monopolisation of violence in the hands of
nation-states, in the context of the emergence of the world nation-state system, poses quite
crucial questions, which simply by-pass the traditional concerns of Marxist theory. Of course
Marxist authors have written a great deal about violence and war - in the context of the
contradictions of capitalism, and in relation to revolutionary violence. In the shape of Marxist-
Leninism, Marxism has helped shape one of the two most formidable war-machines, Soviet
military power, which the world has ever known. Marxism has in this sense helped create the
power-bloc sandwich which tenuously controls the anarchy of the world nation-state system. It is
senseless to ignore the fact that the nation-state has proved to be as significant an aspect of
socialist as of capitalist societies. Socialist states have shown themselves to be as jealously
territorial and aggressive as others. Lenin’s reflections on the First World War, and the
reflections of the Austro-Marxists on the ’nationalities question’ do not help us much here.
Marxism has provided neither the Intellectual nor the political resources to analyse the
implications of the monopolisation of the means of violence In the hands of nation-states.
I think it hard to deny that the fundamental political problem facing us today is the seemingly
implacable expansion of the means of waging war in the context of an anarchical, global nation-
state system. Marx thought he discerned a real movement of change - the labour movement -
which would provide history’s solution to the anarchy of capitalist production and the
degradation of human labour. But where is the dialectical process that will transcend the
political anarchy which threatens us all with imminent destruction? What sort of normative
political theory can be plausibly advanced to suggest how control of the means of violence might
be organised in the good society? While one can see some sense in the argument that control of
the means of production could, in various ways, be returned to the worker, it is hardly desirable to
envisage an equitable distribution of the means of destruction among the general population. All
these things are surely matters that urgently demand analysis. Let me return to the theme of
discontinuity. There is no point in not admitting that today we stand at the outer edge of the
precipice of history. Our existence now is unique In an eerie way. After half a million years of
human history, we are the first human beings whose individual life-spans might terminate with
that of the whole of humankind.

112
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Marshall TH (1964), Class, Citizenship and Social Development, Chicago UP

Poulantzas N (1979), State, Power and Socialism London: New Left Books

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