Anthony Giddens: What I try to do is feed ideas into the discussion in and around the government and to the general discussion going on around the current changes in the world. I don't act as any kind of special advisor or anything, which would I think, be incompatible with my role here at the LSE. What I am interested in is analysing what is going on in the world and government is obviously relevant. What I try and do really is contribute not only to the intellectual debate but also to the policy making debate. It seems to me that we have a world where most of the pre-established political ideologies are in some kind of crisis, if one thinks of the collapse of socialism for example, but there is also I think as profound a crisis of conservativism and of what is left; liberalism or neo-liberalism do not really seem to be up to the job of creating a reasonable society.

Anthony Giddens: First of all it's a mistake just to define them as mainstream, if that means parties that just work on the basis of compromise, as I think we now have a new structural position which makes it possible for a party to try and be more or less the centre party but still try to undertake quite radical policies. The thing that has changed is that radicalism used to mean being on the left. But I don't think that the two words can be equated the same way anymore. We are looking for parties that can defend values and advance policies that many people in society would support, but they would not necessarily be straightforwardly those of the old left or so called 'new right'.

Anthony Giddens: Well, those things are inevitable when you try to move to some degree beyond left and right divisions. For example, consider the issue of conservativism; we are now living in a world where everyone can see a speed up in technological change together with plenty of other sorts of changes, some of which are potentially quite destructive - not only quite obviously to the environment but also possibly to forms of social solidarity. So to some extent and in some context it is relevant to try to insure continuity, cohesion and stability in the face of change; that is why radicalism cannot be equated with producing just any old change and also why I think, for example, Tony Blair should not be afraid sometimes of being called a conservative, as long as it's with a small "cc". In other words, trying t produce a reasonable society where people have some sense of security and stability. After all, the welfare state was originally supposed to produce that.

Anthony Giddens: Well that's it really. I think there are just two kinds of overlapping political agendas. There is the agenda of life chances which is much more the traditional agenda of the left and as a battlefield between left and right it has still not lost its importance because obviously there are very important issues surrounding the issues of equality and so forth, so those things have not gone away, but I think they become joined by a new set of questions which have centrally to do with (to put it bluntly) the transformation of tradition and nature. There were many things that used to be settled by tradition or nature which now have to be decided about. These include not only things in our personal life but also problems and policies going right up to the global level. That is why I think the new agenda of globalisation, plus personal transformation, is not a strictly left-right agenda any more. Look beyond that to the domain of life politics and things seem to me to operate according to different criteria. Overall however, there are things that tie them together - like the desire to live a good life for example.

Anthony Giddens: I don't quite see the difference between them because the key thing is that in many areas of life the people individually and collectively have to actively take decisions about why they are acting as they do. That means to define what kind of life one should live against a background of first of all a confusing variety of informational sources and second of a declining impact of tradition as it 'traditionally' used to be. In other words, even if you want to be traditional, it tends to be a sort of decision for people these days, as in the case of born-again Christians for example. In that kind of world all these things become political because they centre around clashes of values. That's what I mean by life-politics.

Anthony Giddens: I don't agree. Globally there is a kind of battle taking place between consumerism on the one hand and ecological movements on the other. There are all kinds of movements in the world which are not simply dictated by consumer choice. Obviously the issue of consumerism is itself a political issue which one has to confront globally.

Anthony Giddens: Well, I think it is a mistake to concentrate on the internet too narrowly because what has really happened over the past 20 or 30 years is a very consequential merging of these different technologies - Information Technology, Communications Technology, Computerisation. This has already produced some pretty fundamental changes in the global economy; the creation of the 24-hour electronic money markets being probably the single most important example. Incidentally, these kind of globalised markets which governments seem unable to control, do also relate to all sorts of democratic problems because one of the biggest arenas of the global electronic market is government bonds. Governments are basically issuing bonds to borrow money to fund programs which taxpayers can't, or won't, any longer pay for. There is a very interesting sort of connection there.

I think this kind of electronic society does shift the nature of peoples' experience and it is one of the main facts lying behind globalisation, where globalisation is understood itself as not just an economic but also as a communicative phenomenon. What I mean by this is that it is a very different world when you have a world of instantaneous news sources and when you have a diversity of information contexts. As far as I can see, the internet is a particular form of that, a technological form. And anyone who pretends to know what will come of it is just fooling you and fooling themselves.

We used to think that through technological change and scientific innovation we could somehow control the future - just know what the future would be like - but it seems almost to be the opposite. The future is quite opaque and problematic and this is true everywhere you look, whether you look at the internet, whether you look at the future of the welfare state, whether you look at the future of the Ex-Soviet Union; in truth there are all sorts of different scenarios. And you know, the things that one says contributes to those scenarios. That is why the future itself has a kind of reflexive and problematic form. I think the internet itself is only a particular version of this wider phenomenon; on the one hand there is the position of people who regard it as something we should worry about because of information control, information smog, or whatever and on the other you find those techno-freaks who think that it is going to change everything. In truth, nobody knows at the moment.

Anthony Giddens: Not a lot, no. I prefer the term 'weightless economy' that Danny Quah uses (Danny Quah). I think it is quite a good way to look at what is happening in economic terms anyway. If you look at the actual weight of goods traded it has been more or less the same in the global economy over the last 10 years, but the actual value in global economy has gone up enormously. What that amounts to in terms of real life is a very controversial issue. There is also this book by Diana Coyle "The weightless world" (Diana Coyle I think this is a better way of looking at things because the "information society" does not really give you much purchase on what is happening.

Anthony Giddens: Well, I think governments probably have to try to move to regulate global financial markets or at least influence how they work. There are two views on the role of global financial markets. One is the neo-orthodox economic view which sees in them the aggregated wisdom of all the people working in finance in the world. The markets thus are viewed as a system of checks and balances, which respond to correct errors. The most recent example is the Asian economy. That view suggests that basically markets are rational. That's not my view really, that's more like what someone has called a 'global casino-economy.' It is going to be very difficult for governments to somehow stabilise it. There is the idea of Tobin-tax which might be feasible. It has been one of the more feasible things which have been proposed. G7 nations probably could take some actions.

Anthony Giddens: (laughs) Well, one thing would be to slow down the rate of transactions possibly. No one really knows what the real connection is between the new money markets and the real economy. Its all such a mysterious thing because its all pretty new. But for me its the best example of the things you are talking about because it sort of subsumes the internet. What all these people who are working on their screens are doing is what people do on the internet: direct communication, lots of information, all the information is open to everybody; they are all trying to outguess what everyone else is trying to outguess, knowing that they are trying to outguess them - that's what the global financial economy is. And it would not be possible without computers, satellite communications and those kinds of technological changes.

Anthony Giddens: First of all we have to be very careful when talking about "virtual anything". I think the role of computers and telecommunications is very large but it always interacts with naturally being in places and talking to people. We are not doing this conversation on the internet, we actually came here physically to the City of London. People like me need to travel to far more places than we ever did before. Businessmen go to more conferences than they ever did before. So it is not true that virtual space displaces ordinary sociability, in fact, it accentuates the need for it.

So I don't really agree with this idea that there is a kind of virtual class. I think what there is, is more like a kind of emerging, global, cosmopolitan class of people who use these technologies, who are also very mobile, not so linked to any particular nation state, working in symbolic jobs, symbolic analysis...

There are dangers for them becoming separated from the rest of society partly because on the top end they make a hell of a lot of money. It's not old money - it's new money and it is often pretty young people that are involved. And they are either fairly ruthless, or they can become fairly ruthless. You have a peculiar economy of time in the world. You have people like that, which includes people like me, who work all the time; as you know, the new technologies and the instantaneous connections and the total connections they give you, mean that there is no escape. So you are caught within a kind of system ( I mean its very pleasurable in its way) that is a bit like endless work.

That's a form of oppression by time it seems to me. And then at the bottom you get people who have no work at all in the global economy and that's another form of oppression by time of course. I think that is much more important than any virtual classes. I don't believe in hyper-reality. I just believe in reality of social life. I think that all these technologies can interact in interesting ways with the reality of social life.

Anthony Giddens: Yes, I think it is happening. But it is happening, not simply because of these technologies and not simply in these technologies but in the whole wider social world which the new relationship between globalisation and local life is producing. I think what is at issue here is the creation of a kind of world cosmopolitan society of which these technologies are a part but not the only part. Hopefully, alongside that we will have the disappearance of systematic nation state war. That means a changed position for nation states.

You can see that all around because nation states largely existed to make war and form alliances with other nation states and they achieved that through raising tax. And if they can no longer raise tax and fight war in the same way that they did then that's a big change in the world. It is obviously related to communication technologies but it is stupid to treat these technologies as the only force around. That's just not the case.

Another thing that is going on is the increasing impact of science in general which is kind of attacking the body. The body can now just be invaded through either genetic technologies or through other scientific means. This is a big change that also has consequences.

Anthony Giddens: We are in this dialogical reflexive relationship with science because once science becomes globalised and the pace of scientific change becomes advanced then it affects our life so immediately that we can't wait around for scientists to quote "test" unquote, their new findings. We are all in a much more interrogative relationship not just with scientists themselves but also with their scientific findings. For me, what are more interesting than information technologies are things like food because food production has been thoroughly invaded by the impact of science and technology and has become globalised. You see it all around you - these new food disorders. I saw yesterday this image of twins who looked worse than someone in a concentration camp and they both died of anorexia. That seems to be a fairly new thing. It might be related to the problem of how you eat and how you live, when these things are active life-style choices, like the outer fringe of life-politics when all around you these things are wrought with compulsiveness and possession.

Anthony Giddens: Well, it was not just investment. It is a mistake to link science and technology too closely to strategies of global capitalism. Yes, I think they are important, but there is the structure of science itself which is based upon global prestige and visible achievement. That is part of the motivating force for science and that in a way is why it is unstoppable because you might try and control genetic technologies in Europe but who's going to say what will happen in the rest of the world. These things will still go on. If you are like the people in Scotland who cloned a sheep, then your place in the scientific lexicon is quite secured because it counts as a major scientific achievement. It is very hard to see how it can be stopped.

Anthony Giddens: I think it is like a global rubbish dump really. It is like going to the beach with a metal detector. Unless you just use two or three sources, going to the internet and finding something viable, is like you have to go through 95 % complete dross before you get to anything that is going to be helpful to you.

It creates a new role, as you were saying, for interpreters of information because you just have so much information put on the internet. But it's also the same going to a news store because with all the magazines which are there, a new role is appearing for people who can filter that information to policy makers and governments and make some sense of it. The trouble is that no one knows what is going to happen.

Anthony Giddens: There is a definite limit to the role of spin doctors and media management, which I think we can now see emerging in both Britain and the United States. The racing car affair is a kind of example of that. You cannot just manage the media without having a deeper kind of democratising policy making of some sort. You try to manage the media but in the end the media will get you anyway, because you can't manage everything all the time. You have got to be seen as a government which is authentic and not just weightless itself...as it was. Really, I think quite a few of the old questions reappear here.

Anthony Giddens: What I referred to in my book as the 'democratising of democracy'. In this world of multiple information sources and visible information, governments cannot do things in the way in which they used to; then, it was mainly in some sense, corrupt; it was all done behind the scenes by influence and personal connections and so forth. There has to be more transparency; transparency is not just the same as media management, it means new structures of the state. To put it more concretely, it means finding some more effective way in this country to fund political parties. That is a form of democratisation.

Anthony Giddens: You can hear it worldwide. It is a response to global forces, I think. You have corruption cases all over the world in politics; it can't be just an accidental thing, it must be related to the new visibility of governments, or to the role that the media and all governments must take as some kind of response to survive; that could be a quite positive response.

Anthony Giddens: I think to some degree there will be a new stratum of intellectuals who actually will have to make these interpretations - Ulrich Beck would be one of these - between media and politics essentially. Without that you are just lost in a sea of information.

Anthony Giddens: Well, everyone can now see you can't just hand over things to the experts. One of the reasons is that you get one who is an expert in a very small area but a layman in all other areas and another is that experts don't on the whole agree. As you yourself come into contact with science you discover that it is something very different from what you might naively have believed it to be. It is much more a kind of organised scepticism than finding a certain truth. It is very unsettling to be in contact with it because you don't know to whom you should turn. Therefore, there are always some interpreters in that situation I think, to whom you tend to go. I think therapists are a bit like that.

Anthony Giddens: The reason is that equal opportunity, even if you get very near to that, is compatible with a very unequal society and might produce a very unhappy society if that is all there were. If you were at the bottom and knew there were quite a few like you at the bottom, you might feel like a class of untouchables or something and I can't see this as a very desirable situation, so we have to look for containing inequality more generally.

Moreover equality of opportunity only operates through the labour market. And at any one time nearly half of the population are outside of that market. The problem is that no one knows quite how to contain inequality, it does seem to be produced by expanding globalisation, or at least expanding inequality seems to correlate pretty closely with intensified globalisation. It seems to be a really big problem for governments at the moment that no one clearly knows how to resolve, since they don't seem to be resolving it directly through the tax system anymore.

Anthony Giddens: Partly because in most countries there are strong constraints against increasing taxes and a pressure to bring taxes down rather than to increase them; partly also because it seems to be a global force that is hard to contain on the level of the nation state and therefore it goes back to the question if whether we will have any global agencies which could exert a more regulative influence on the world. I am not in favour of this idea of a spontaneous system type thing which seems a part of internet philosophy. There is something in it, but it could just produce a world that runs riot, producing the most awful consequences for some people. You are looking to some kind of global governance but it might take a crisis to produce it. Quite a few of the major changes in history were produced by wars.

Anthony Giddens: I think the neo-right is very worrying because it is in a sense a rational response to globalisation that is an opting out of the global economy, coupled with the protection of local morality and local national identity, as defined by those groups. That's a dangerous thing because if that went any distance then the world would simply be back where it started - in catastrophe and war.

Anthony Giddens: Yes, it is, really. What happens plainly is that with globalisation you get pressure downwards and you get pressure upwards. All sorts of groups get formed which are not directly involved with national or even local government.

The biggest development in all western countries has been self help groups and autonomous forms of organisation, some of which themselves, are globalising. Urlich Beck, or someone else, calls them the 'party of non-politics'. The only growing party is the party of people who are not interested in old style politics but in other kinds of political endeavours. However, you cannot run the world just through the activities of single interest groups. These are bound to become more important, Greenpeace or whatever. I don't see any particular reason why we should worry about that. But any government, whether it is local, or national, or European, has to balance the interests of different groups and has to take a stance in law, national law and international law.

I think one of the reasons why the world might not become completely incoherent, is the rule of law. Because law does at least provisionally take a stance on issues - abortion, human rights and so forth, whatever it might be. Therefore, I think the defence of a coherent system of international law, that protects basic rights, is very, very important in stabilising world society.