R A L F DA H R E N D O R F

1 may 1929 . 17 june 2009

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

VOL. 155, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2011

biographical memoirs

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HEN LORD RALF DAHRENDORF died in Cologne on 17 June 2009, the world lost one of the most forceful and distinguished intellectual leaders of the second half of the twentieth century. I use the generic term “intellectual” advisedly, for he not only established himself as an eminent social scientist and social philosopher, but also engaged in a lifelong struggle to apply his ideas to the continuing issues and dilemmas of the Western world and to involve himself directly as leader in many of Europe’s political and educational institutions. The time of his birth was a moment of high crisis in the West—only a few months before the onset of the Great Depression, and only a few years before the era of Nazi domination. His father, Gustaf Dahrendorf, was a Social Democrat politician who opposed the Nazi regime and was arrested and imprisoned twice, once in 1933 and once in 1944. Also in 1944, at the age of fifteen, young Ralf joined a group of “truthspreading” students and was also arrested and imprisoned. His first lessons in liberty and its violations could not have been more immediate and vivid. Subsequently, as a student at the University of Hamburg he proved to be a Wunderkind, completing a doctorate in philosophy and classics at the age of twenty-three. He then went forthwith to the London School of Economics, where he attained a second doctorate in sociology after two years of study. He was affiliated with academic institutions all his life, but never permanently married to any; he taught at Columbia, Tübingen, Konstanz, Harvard, and the London School of Economics. His long and distinguished academic reputation began (and was basically established) by the publication of his first book, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, which appeared in English in 1959. The timing of that publication was fortuitous, because it appeared just as the school of sociological functionalism—the reigning theoretical approach in sociology for two decades after World War II—was beginning to reveal cracks that foreshadowed its collapse in the 1970s. That school was the object of Dahrendorf’s negative polemic; he scolded it as a “utopian” approach to society that idealized social cohesion and stability and denied the centrality of conflict, which he regarded as endemic. He was probably functionalism’s most quoted critic. Yet he did not embrace functionalism’s opposite—classical Marxism. He scolded it for its special form of determinism, and preferred to re-write its fundamental principles in more political terms, as conflict over authority. He thus established himself as a theoretical “in-betweener,” closer in spirit and substance to Max Weber. In the second half of the book he developed a synthetic theory of conflict of his own, but, while insightful, it never established itself as an enduring theoretical formulation in the social sciences. [ 466 ]

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Dahrendorf wrote many other books—Society and Democracy in Germany (1969), The Modern Social Conflict: Essays on the Politics of Liberty (1988), After 1989: Morals, Revolution and Civil Society (1997), and Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe (2004). All were less “theoretical” in a sociological sense than his first work, and all combined a preoccupation with liberty and other democratic values, commentary on institutions and events (mainly in Europe) in relation to that preoccupation, concern with threats to liberty, and awareness of its fragility. By virtue of this continuing public commentary, and by virtue of his extensive lecturing and public dialogue, he established himself as a leading voice in Europe’s political debates for a half century. He remained fiercely independent, and would debate Milton Friedman (the free-market extremist) and Rudi Deutschke (the Red Army Faction radical) with equal vigor. Dahrendorf was a man of action as well. In 1968 he was elected to the Baden-Württemberg state parliament as a Free Democrat, and the following year he was elected to the Bundestag, becoming a junior foreign office minister in Willy Brandt’s Social Democrat–Free Democrat coalition. Between 1970 and 1973 he was a European Economic Community commissioner in Brussels, but became alienated by the “perniciousness” of its bureaucracy. Then began a long period of academic leadership in Britain. For ten years (1974–84) he served admirably as director of LSE, holding steady in the face of many student upheavals and surviving inventively in the period of budgetary and political onslaughts from the Thatcher regime. Beginning in 1987 he served several years as warden of St. Anthony’s at Oxford. In the end he had two countries. He was forever a German, but he was always drawn to British politics and institutions, and to the British way of life. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1977, became a British citizen in 1983, was made a life peer in 1993, and served actively in the House of Lords. A few personal notes may be in order. Ralf Dahrendorf and I were born only fifteen months apart (he on 1 May 1929, I on 22 July 1930). Though in precisely the same age cohort, our environments in early life were unimaginably different. He was a child in the period of Nazi domination and an adolescent in the chaos of World War II; I was a child of the Depression in the insulated cultural environment of Phoenix, Arizona, and an adolescent observer of that war from a protected place. No one would have predicted any convergence of lives from these origins. We were brought together because (1) we both became theoretically oriented sociologists and both published influential works at a very early age and (2), what is more important, we were both writing in the shadow of Talcott Parsons. As indicated, Dahrendorf’s Class and

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Class Conflict in Industrial Society was regarded as one of the decisive early critiques (along with Lewis Coser’s book The Functions of Social Conflict, published in 1956) of Parsons’s theory of social integration. At that stage of my career I was regarded as a young Parsonian, largely because Parsons and I had collaborated in the writing of Economy and Society (1956), and I was preparing an “application” of Parsonian action theory to processes of structural change in the British Industrial Revolution. Since Parsons was so much at the center of sociology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dahrendorf and I were regarded by many as young antagonists, and were invited to appear occasionally on international panels on sociological theory. Neither of us proved very dogmatic on these occasions, however, a fact that must have disappointed those coming to witness a theoretical bloodbath. A little later we were again paired in a most unusual way. E. P. Thompson was the English historian who threw a bombshell into the interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution—and social history in general—with the publication of The Making of the English Working Class (1963). In the first chapter of that book he selected two negative polemic targets— Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict and my Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959)—as the two principal wrongheaded ways of thinking about the development of industrial society! In those early years of our careers Ralf and I seemed to develop a theoretical respect for one another and, despite the great geographical distance between us, sought one another out when occasions permitted. I recall one occasion at the meetings of the International Sociological Association in Evian in the summer of 1966, when we took leave from the meetings and had a long afternoon conversation in a local café. I cannot speak for him, but for me it was a very educational occasion. In particular, he made one memorable comment on my book Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. He said he appreciated my stress on changes in social structure (especially changes in complexity associated with structural differentiation), but said that I must pay more attention to the groups that are precipitated from new structural arrangements and the conflicts that develop among them. This point emanated, of course, directly from his own theoretical orientation. I was deeply impressed with his observation and the conversation that followed, probably because my own thinking had been moving in that direction in an inarticulate way in my work on social movements and social conflict (Theory of Collective Behavior, 1962). In all events, that conversation on the relations between social structure and groups has remained, as a kind of friendly ghost, a profound reminder for me in much of my subsequent thinking.

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From those early times in our careers, we went in very different directions and communicated little, though I kept a kind of intellectual contact with him by assigning his work in my theory courses. We met at LSE once, and had a reunion in Berkeley in April 1989, when Dahrendorf was delivering the Sanford Elberg lectures for the Institute of International Studies on that campus. I commented formally on his lecture, and we managed a long walk and another engaging conversation on the state of the sociological world. In all, I cannot say that our relationship was an intimate one or that we influenced one another very much, but I always regarded our association, for me, as a privileged one with a rare mind and a rare human being. Elected 1977

Neil J. Smelser Professor Emeritus Department of Sociology University of California, Berkeley