In Remembrance of the Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf

Abstract

[MWS 10.1 (2010) 23-27] ISSN 1470-8078 In Remembrance of the Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf M. Rainer Lepsius Countless tributes have been made to Lord Dahrendorf, both on his eightieth birthday 1 May 2009 and his death on 17 June 2009. At the centre of all these appreciations stands his international impor tance as a 'public intellectual', and indeed he was an Anglo-German intellectual to an outstanding degree. He himself designated as 'Erasmians' the few who, under threat of their lives, withstood the temptations of Communism and of National Socialism. He could count himself, like his father, as one of them. For him, individual freedom was the highest good, and the preservation and the secur ing of freedom his life's aim. Dahrendorf once distinguished between 'sociology as a world view and sociology as a profession'. He had become a 'sociologist with a world view' after he had switched to politics in 1969, and after he had settled in England in 1974 where he had taken up a major position in university life, finally taking a seat in the House of Lords. In the earlier part of his life, however, he was a pre-eminently influential and trend-setting 'professional sociologist'. This I recall as a member of his generation that fought for the strengthening of sociology. Fifty years before, in November 1956, we were elected to the German Sociological Association, together with forty others who included Hans Albert, Karl Martin Bolte, Ludwig von Friede burg, Heinz Kluth, Renate Mayntz, Heinrich Popitz and Erwin K. Scheuch. Dahrendorf was always the first among us: the first to habilitate, the first to hold a professorship, the first who took the chairmanship of the German Society of Sociology. We were impressed—at least I certainly was—by the clarity of his arguments and by the decisiveness of his expositions. He was the most visible among us, and at the sociology conference of 1959 in Berlin he was the representative of the cohort that built up sociology in Germany in the sixties.© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 24 Max Weber Studies Dahrendorf became a sociologist when he studied at the London School of Economics from 1952-54. Before then he had already gained his postgraduate degree in Hamburg with a dissertation on Karl Marx. For a postwar German, London was the gateway to the world —lively, open to new horizons, its traditions still intact—and the London School of Economics was an incomparable urban intel lectual milieu. It was there that Dahrendorf met Karl Popper whose theory of science guided him beyond hermeneutics and the dialectic, close to Kant and distanced from Hegel. T.H. Marshall with his book Citizenship and Social Class directed him towards his central theme: citizenship and civil society. Under the rubric of 'education as a citizenship right' Dahrendorf later extended Marhall's schema of developing citizenship rights beyond legal equality, political partici pation and social equality to the equality of cultural chances. Work ing with David Lockwood he also developed a 'conflict sociology', which he advanced against Parson's integrationist sociology. These orientations were further supported by an invitation to the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto for the year 1957-58. Dahrendorf positioned himself outside the sociologi cal milieu in Germany, then dominated by H. Schelsky, Th. Adorno and René König with a habilitation, in 1957 in marginal Saarbrücken. Dahrendorf had established linkages to Anglo-Saxon sociology at a time when provincialism prevailed in Germany. It was at this time that Dahrendorf in quick succession published books and essays that set the direction and now count as classics. With Soziale Klasse und Klassenkonflikt in der industriellen Gesellschaft (1957), whose second enlarged edition only appeared in English (as Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959), he seized what for most of us were the central themes: a rediscovery of the sociologi cal legacy of Karl Marx, the problematic of class formation, social inequality and social conflict. Under National Socialism Marx was taboo and in place of classes there was only the people's commu nity ('Volksgemeinschaft'), and conflicts...