Abstract
<p>Anthony Giddens built one of the most ambitious sociological programs of the late twentieth century. This review reconstructs its chronology from suicide, class, and the classics through structuration theory, late modernity, self-identity, globalization, the Third Way, climate politics, and digital rights. It argues that the work is held together by a durable problem: how knowledgeable action recursively reproduces institutions across time and space while generating unintended consequences. The program matured by scaling reflexivity from situated conduct to institutional systems, biographies, global interdependence, and political steering. Its major achievements are the duality of structure, the temporal-spatial reconstruction of social order, and a relational account of trust, risk, and selfhood. Its limitations are ontological abstraction, weak causal discrimination, insufficient treatment of race, colonialism, gendered and classed inequality, and a policy turn that sometimes narrows earlier critical ambitions. The review identifies empirical afterlives and priorities for revising Giddens under digital and planetary conditions.</p>