Giddens Anthony. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 1: Power, property and the state

Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981. — 294 p. — ISBN: 0-520-04490-8.Anthony Giddens's new book takes on the two great schools of sociological theory about the development of societies, functionalism and historical materialism, and finds them wanting. The centre of the book is a critique of historical materialism as a theory of power, as an account of history and as a political theory. The penetrating account of the limitations of Marxism — its simpte evolutionary schemas, its limited economic view of exploitation and its narrow anthropology — is based on the re-introduction into social theory of the twin concepts of time and space, essential to any historical sociology, human geography or urban analysis, but so often overlooked in the last twenty years.
Anthony Giddens is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author of numerous books on social theory, including Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (California, 1979).