Ralf Dahrendorf, sociologist, politician
NEW YORK - Ralf Dahrendorf, a German sociologist whose experiences in Nazi Germany led him to develop a theory of liberalism and human freedom that often went against the grain of German politics in the postwar period, died Wednesday in Cologne. He was 80.
“Europe has lost one of its most important thinkers and intellectuals,’’ said Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Dr. Christiane Dahrendorf.
Democracy and its problems preoccupied Dr. Dahrendorf for his entire career as a scholar and as a politician in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. As a high school student he had been imprisoned by the Nazis for spreading leaflets opposing the regime, and early in his life he developed a deep suspicion of what he called “closed, encompassing systems.’’
Dr. Dahrendorf championed liberal pluralism, a social system he defined as recognizing divergent interests and aspirations and putting institutions in place that allow them to be expressed.
Democracy is “about organizing conflict and living with conflict,’’ he told an audience at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989.
“The world isn’t simple, nor should it be simple,’’ he continued. “It’s rich, because it’s complicated. Let’s learn to live with this.’’
He explored these ideas in “Class and Class Conflict in Civil Society’’ (1957), which famously proposed the counter-Marxist idea that power, rather than property, defined social class. In his later books, including “Society and Democracy in Germany’’ and “Modern Social Conflict,’’ pursued similar themes.
“As a scholar he was always addressing human value problems in democracy, especially freedom, but he was also deeply involved in the civic life of Germany,’’ said Neil J. Smeltser, emeritus professor of sociology at Berkeley. “He bridged the gap between social theory and social practice as well as anyone I can think of.’’
Dr. Dahrendorf, who earned his doctorates from the University of Hamburg (in philosophy) and the London School of Economics (sociology), taught at the universities of Saarbruecken, Tuebingen, and Konstanz in West Germany, and at Stanford in California.
In 1969, he was elected to the federal parliament as a Free Democrat. He was a junior foreign minister in Willy Brandt’s, first government and in 1970 became a European commissioner.
He favored laws and policies that encouraged personal freedom, a sense of citizenship, and a broadening of social, economic, and political opportunities.
In 1974, he became director of the London School of Economics, a post he held for the next decade. He returned to Germany to become chairman of the social sciences department at Konstanz University. In 1987 he accepted the position of warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford.
