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Anthony Giddens: The Consequences of Modernity (Dusledky modernity) Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství (SLON), 2003, 200 pages, ISBN: 80-86429-15-6 (2nd edition).
Today, Anthony Giddens is probably the best-known British sociologist. With Anglo-Saxon predominance in the world of sociological thought in past decades, this reputation makes him one of the most prominent social scientists in the world. The Consequences of Modernity was Giddens's first book to have been published by the SLON publishing house in 1998. Since then, more of his volumes have appeared on the Czech market, yet the re-publishing of this work exemplifies its continuous relevance.
The text is virtually one extensive essay compiled on the basis of long personal development of Giddens's scientific efforts. Its origins stem from lectures and previous publications. As with other texts of the author, who claims that no reader has read everything, seeming redundancy is in fact instrumental to create a coherent text that contains enough evidence and self-reference to former work.1 It is divided rather into aggregated wholes than into distinctive chapters, which - as the author claims - prevents interrupting the flow of argument. And the particular arguments do link up to each other: the text, however implicit in its logic argumentation, cannot be used as a textbook to refer to, since one fact stems from another. This is especially true about neologisms that swarm the text, as well as terms that Giddens tends to use equivocally, ascribing to them his own redefined meanings that can cause some confusion for a more gullible reader.
By this work, the author distinctively steps in the debate of the nature of the time we live in. The debate has been marked by a gradually growing resentment to the "project of modernity", declared as obsolete, or to "the modern" - sometimes mistaken for a moderated positivistic reliance on progress - as exhausted that was formulated by heralds of post-modernity (such as Baudrillard, Maffesoli, or Bauman). Advocates of postmodern principles predicate on the destruction of "the social", resulting in fragmentation of society into individuals whose main concern becomes to create their own identity while keeping it flexible enough to survive in the somewhat "liquid"2 environment of the decentralized world of modern cities with no undisputed knowledge base and set values.
Giddens argues that...