Anthony Giddens is the most widely read and cited social theorist of his generation. Throughout his career, Giddens has written more than thirty books.

Anthony Giddens was born in 1938 in Edmonton, North London. He completed his B.A. in Sociology and Psychology at the University of Hull, his M.A. at the London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. He lectured at the University of Leicester, before moving to King's College Cambridge, where he became Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. During this period, his first important publication is Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971). In 1976 he published New Rules of Sociological Method, in 1979 Central Problems in Social Theory, and in 1984 The Constitution of Society. From 1997 to 2003 he was Director of the London School of Economics, where today he remains as a Professor.

His ideas have profoundly influenced the writing and teaching of sociology and social theory around the world. Among his books are Europe in Global Age (2006), The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998), The Third Way and It's Critics (2000), and Runaway World: How Globalization is reshaping Our Lives (1999). His impact upon politics has been particularly profound. He popularised the notion of the third way in political thinking, and his ideas have influenced social policies and political parties across the world. His advice has been sought by political leaders from Asia, Latin America and Australia, as well as from the US and Europe. He has had a major impact upon the evolution of New Labour in the UK and has been a consultant to the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

He co-founded the academic publishing house Polity Press in 1985. He was the 1999 BBC Reith Lecturer. He was given a life peerage in June 2004, as Baron Giddens of Southgate.

In the debate promoted by the WSS on the subject of fear as a peculiar and ineradicable trait of modern-day society, Anthony Giddens' contribution is the authoritative voice of a scholar who for years has devoted his attention to the social processes of our time, which have brought about risky and dangerous situations hitherto unheard of in the whole of history. He argues, in particular, that the changes going on in institutions and in everyday life in recent decades imply not a shift to a new phase in society, moving beyond the system previously in place (post-modernity), but rather a radicalisation of the main characteristics of modernity (late-modernity).

Globalisation is one of the dominant traits of this "radical modernity". A result of the separation of space and time (disembedding), in that the social space is no longer restricted by the spatial and temporal confines within which it moves. In The consequences of modernity (1990) globalisation is in particular defined as the "intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away, and vice versa". In short, globalisation processes manifest as an intersection of experiences, an intrusion of distance into the local dimension.

The global dimension enters people's everyday lives especially through experience mediatisation processes. By revolutionising the traditional notions of time and space, the electronic media have made it possible to establish social relations regardless of the local contexts of interaction. Faraway events may become as familiar as or even more familiar than the universe of local presences with which the individual comes into contact every day. Distance, therefore, may be integrated in the context of personal experience. Thus individuals become members of a global community, from which no one claim to be outside. This results not from a process of cultural homogenisation but from the participation of individuals in planetary events and a growing awareness of global risks that have effects on the life of individuals.

In this sense, Giddens views the phenomenon of globalisation not simply as a macro-social question, affecting only large-scale systems (financial markets, States, etc.), but as a set of more complex dynamics whose effects are felt above all in everyday life: the ways of forming new relations are expanding, and becoming ever more ambiguous, traditional family and neighbourhood systems are changing, knowledge is growing, and increasingly shared, with access to information increasingly a subject of power and conflict; migratory movements lead to the emergence of new populations with whom coexistence must be guaranteed; brand new sorts of behaviour and lifestyles are emerging; the sense of belonging to the national community is weakening as a consequence of the strengthening of a global identity, and at the same time there is a revival in regional and local peculiarities particularism, and so on. Globalisation even transforms our cities, our shops, our amusements, our political conceptions, our vision of "nation" and of "state", our representation of what is the "past" and what is "modern".

These processes transform the characteristics and the role of the nation, of the family, of employment, of tradition and of nature, which turn into "shell institutions", which end up not adapting to the global cosmopolitan society and engendering in individuals a sense of impotence. This is not the sign of an individual failure, but reflects the inadequacy of our institutions. Accordingly, if globalisation is often perceived as wild and lacking in ethics, it is because traditional institutions have not been re-conceived and adapted to the new tasks they are called upon to perform in modern-day society, in order to make it possible to democratically control the above set of changes and trends. It is a shortcoming that radicalises the pathologies of Ego and heightens the crisis of social ties, multiplying both the spheres of unlimitedness and the factors of insecurity and fear, with the individual feeling the need to resolve, alone and privately, problems of a structural nature.

This does not mean that traditional institutions have to be dismantled and replaced with new, "inexperienced" institutions. Far from it, as Giddens has reiterated recently in Europe in the global age (2006), nation States, as well as supranational organisations, for example, still have a role to play and power to be wielded, but for them to be become more effective they need to review their set-ups and operating procedures; this revision will have to be the first item on any future agenda. Because it is from the authority and above all from the authoritativeness of the institutions that the citizens will be obliged to summon up the courage and the strength to "trust" and to have no fear.