The Problem of Freedom in Contemporary German Sociology

Abstract

Despite the many years separating Herbert Marcuse and Ralph Dahrendorf,' nearly the span of a generation, and notwithstanding a number of similar subjects treated by both and, especially, similar influences of sociological tradition to which they were both exposed, these two authors can be seen as the representatives of two different ways of sociologizing: this is what I am chiefly concerned about demonstrating in this essay. With regard to the similar subjects, given the impossibility of attempting an exhaustive analysis, we must be content to underline the importance, for both, of the main issue under discussion in this essay-i.e., freedom, with particular reference to its relationship with utopia-in dealing with which they both used many of the same terms. Moreover, this subject unites the two authors in a common feeling of social commitment and concern which at times becomes a specifically political commitment, plainly visible in the evolution of their work. Marcuse, whose point of departure was a phenomenological-existential outlook very clearly evinced in his early philosophical writings, proceeds in his thinking through a re-assessment of the Hegelian dialectic and ultimately arrives at a Marxist line of thought whose ethical and political ideals he assimilates and maintains to the end, in an increasingly fervent denunciation of the evils of contemporary society, to which greater pathos is lent by the psychoanalytical bent of his analysis. Dahrendorf, while more immediately sociological, also takes Marx as his point of departure. However, he applies to Marx a method carried over from the Weberian tradition of taking a distance from any over-schematic or unilinear interpretation of social questions and in a certain sense anticipates other more recent mediations between the two great keys to the interpretation of sociology: Marxism and Functionalism, both insufficient to express his personal anthropology, derived from Kant and Popper, or his adherence to the liberalist ideal. We cannot, however, take the fact that Marcuse held to a tradition more rigidly than many of his colleagues from the same Frankfurt School as a reason to accuse him a posteriori of not having kept up with the times. On the contrary, as we know, a kind of symbiosis came to be established in the 60's