I vividly remember reading Ralf Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict which came out in 1959 at University and being sufficiently impressed to write a letter about it to the local newspaper in the early 1960s – hardly endearing me to the local party. So I was delighted that when a couple of Germans wrote this marvellous biography of the Liberal who ran the LSE and was active in both the German parliament and also the House of Lords - Ralf Dahrendorf – between social theory and political practice O Kuhne and L Leonardi (2020) While Olaf Kühne’s introduction focuses strongly on Dahrendorf’s terminology and contribution to sociological basic concepts and is very closely related to Dahrendorf’s writings, which are mostly initially published in German, Laura Leonardi’s introduction is more strongly oriented toward the late phase of Dahrendorf’s work and more strongly oriented toward the influences and effects of Dahrendorf’s writings. Due to the strong complementarity of the two introductions and the lack of such an introduction to the ‘classic’ Dahrendorf in the English language, we have decided to synthesize our books to complement the more recent literature and to publish them in English.
This volume on the topicality of Ralf Dahrendorf first deals with the biography of Ralf Dahrendorf, which was marked by scientific, scientific political, and political activities (Chapter 2). The following chapter (Chapter 3 dedicated to Ralf Dahrendorf’s basic understanding of the theory of science as well as his ideas on the conception and practice of sociological science. Chapter 4 presents a topic that has (co)shaped his publications from the very beginning: the (productive) power of social conflicts. As explained above, Dahrendorf has dealt intensively with democracy and society in the United States as well as in Germany. This is addressed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 deals with the interface between society and person: the social norms and roles as well as the possibilities of enforcing their observance. This is followed in particular by a discussion of the political/philosophical consequences of his theory of conflict and roles, as well as an introduction to his explanations of political liberalism (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 focuses on his remarks on life chances, rights, and civil society, as well as on a topic in which his scientific and political thinking is mutually supportive—the civil right to education. Chapter 9 deals with the social and political challenges that Ralf Dahrendorf dealt with in his late work.
Addressing, for example, the crisis of the labor society, the transformation processes in East-Central and Eastern Europe, how to deal with the financial crisis, but also with questions about the future of the European Union. In Chapter 10 we deal primarily with the critique of the concepts and political ideas of Ralf Dahrendorf, but also to some extent with parallels to the approaches of other current thinkers from the liberal spectrum.
Contents
1 Introductory Remarks
2 Biography Between Social Theory and Political Practice
2. 1 An Eventful Childhood and Youth
2. 2 The Rise of an Ambitious Young Scientist
2. 3 The Politician Ralf Dahrendorf
2. 4 Between Politics, Science, Science Administration, and the ‘Public Intellectual’: The Time After Professional Politics
3 Ralf Dahrendorf’s Understanding of Science and the Position of Sociology in the Sciences
3. 1 The Role of the Scientist in Society
3. 2 Sociology as Science—Fundamental Approaches
4 Conflict and Society
4. 1 Basic Considerations on Ralf Dahrendorf’s Conflict Theory
4. 2 The Confrontation with the Conflict Ideas of Talcott Parsons
and Karl Marx
4. 3 Domination and Conflict
4. 4 The Nature of Conflicts and How to Deal with Them
4. 5 The Transformations of Social Conflict in Modernity
References
5 Dahrendorf and the Democracies in Germany and the United States
5. 1 Dahrendorf and the United States of America
5. 2 Dahrendorf and the German Society
6 The ‘Annoying Fact of Society’: Norms and Roles in ‘Homo
Sociologicus’
6. 1 The Regularity of Society: Norms and Roles
6. 2 The Human Being as Carrier of Preformed Roles—The ‘Homo
Sociologicus’
7 Individuals and Social Institutions: Contributions to Political
Liberalism
7. 1 The Relationship Between Theory and Practice
7. 2 Dahrendorf’s Understanding of Liberty
7. 3 The Loss of Democratic Participation: The ‘Homo Sociologicus’
and Social Inequality
7. 4 Social Development and the Danger of Bureaucratizatio n
7. 5 Citizenship and Market—The Difficult Balance Between
Redistribution and Growth
7. 6 The Defense of Liberal Society
8 Ligatures, Rights, and Opportunities: The Development of Civil
Society
8. 1 The Achievements of Modern Society and the Loss of Ligatures
8. 2 Rights and Duties
8. 3 Life Chances and the Norm of Their Maximization
8. 4 Democracy and Capitalism: Progression and Regression of Life
Chances
8. 5 Civil and Authoritarian Society
8. 6 The Civil Right to Education
9 Social Upheavals and the Precarious Conditions of Intellectuals and
Domination
9. 1 The Labor Society in Crisis
9. 2 Western European Democracies Transform: The British Case
and the German Case
9. 3 The Observations of Transformation in Eastern Central and
Eastern Europe
9. 4 The Vulnerability of Intellectuals
9. 5 The Challenge of Globalization
9. 6 The Europe of a ‘Skeptical Europeanist’: Opportunities and
Constraints of European Integration
9. 7 After the Financial Crisis: Visions of Time and Economic Ethics
References
10 Dahrendorf’s Critics and Parallels to Other Liberal Thinkers of the
Present Day
10. 1 Criticism of Dahrendorf’s Work
10. 2 Parallels to Other Liberal Thinkers of the Present Day
References
11 The Topicality of Ralf Dahrendorf: A Conclusion
Life Chances Ralf Dahrendorf (1979) - an early opus Shaped by the State – toward a new political history of the 20th C ed B Cebul,
Mason Williams et al (2019) The Divide – a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions
Jason Hickel (2023)
For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich
countries and poor countries. We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?
Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world’s population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined. What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.
Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.
Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.
Rule of the Robots – how AI will transform everything Martin Ford (2021) 178pp Less than a quarter the size of the next book Why machines Will Never Rule the World – AI without fear B Landgrebe and Barry Smith (2025) 680pp Stolen Revolution – betrayal and hope in modern Iran Y Torbati and B Sharafedin (2026)
We tell this story of a country through the eyes of six people who have lived through and shaped these events. They come from different social classes and ethnic backgrounds, with varying views on the Islamic Republic and the reasons behind its failure. Some of them helped to strengthen the government at times, or were complicit in some of its crimes, while others have a hardened, uncompromising stance on the regime. Each of them ended up challenging a system that sought to subjugate them. They have diverging visions for Iran’s future: the total overthrow of the Islamic
Republic, its reform from within, or the return of the monarchy. In their nuances, they reflect the astonishing diversity of contemporary Iranian society, which has simultaneously resisted and been forced to make do with its rulers.
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian writer forced to leave Romania in 1966
and now settled in the US and has given us a variety of novels –
with oceanpdf offering 4The Blood Countess Andrei Codrescu (1995) Wakefield Andrei Codrescu (2004) Casanova in Bohemia Andrei Codrescu (2005) Whatever Gets You Through the Night Andrei Codrescu (2011)Dementia – how the West has lost its history and risks losing everything else David Andress (2018)
This book argues that recent political events place the UK, France and the USA in a state of catastrophic cultural dementia. That is a very strong term, and I mean it absolutely seriously. It is not an image to be deployed lightly. My own father died of Alzheimer’s in May 2015; most people’s families now include at least one similar story of terrible decline. It is precisely because what confronts us now risks being an equally horrifying slide into dissolution that the term is warranted here. And because a culture, unlike an individual, may hope to recover from its dementia, before it is too late.
Our current dementia takes the form of particular kinds of forgetting, misremembering and mistaking the past. In that sense it is not nostalgia, which is at root merely a form of homesickness for the remembered past. Nor is it, any more than an individual’s dementia, a simple matter of amnesia. In most cases, the amnesiac is aware that they do not remember; and knowledge of that lack – and of the potential to fill it from external information – is something to cling to. The dementia sufferer is denied the comfort of knowing they don’t remember.
By disintegrating a person’s coherent recollection of their personal history, dementia strips them of their anchorage in the past. Who they were and who they are become muddled; their own identity and those of their loved ones become confused and dissonant. Situations cease to make sense, erupting unexpectedly into a mind that thinks itself in another time or place and cannot hold itself lucidly in the present. Anger, bitterness and horror coexist with fond illusion and placid self-absorption. Practical action becomes impossible. For many, there is a lapse into hallucination, delusion and paranoid suspicion of all around them. Le Pen. Brexit. Trump. These might once have been the punchlines to a joke. But no more. The processes that have brought these names to global attention are nothing less than symptoms of rising cultural dementia. The former great powers of the historic ‘West’, now old in ways that cultures have seldom been before – actually old, demographically speaking, in previously unthinkable terms – seem to be abandoning the wisdom of maturity for senescent daydreams of recovered youth. Along the way they are stirring up old hatreds, giving disturbing voice to destructive rage and risking the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just governance.
At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. Historical stories abound; but as deployed in public debate they are often little better than dangerous fantasies, constantly at risk of abrupt and jarring collision with reality. Unlike Germany, for example, these countries have never undertaken the painful process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: the coming to terms with the past that ceases to treat it as a comforting inspiration, and wrestles with the evils it conceals. Not even Germany, of course, has completed such a process irreversibly and entirely happily. Chancellor Merkel’s noble decision to open the nation’s borders to refugees in 2015 created a backlash that helped the anti-immigrant, conservative-nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party to a poll breakthrough in the 2017 Federal elections. However, as has been the case with many far-right movements across Europe, the AfD’s ‘breakthrough’ only netted them one in every eight votes –well below the almost one in five shared by the major forces at the other end of the spectrum, Die Linke and Die Grünen. The presence of groups such as the AfD is an unpleasant component of the ‘new normal’ of global politics, but so far has not produced any dangerously disruptive systematic consequences. Until these groups and their toxic messages are able to claim 30 per cent or more of the vote, we can still reasonably hope that the centre in Germany and elsewhere will hold. By the same token, looking further afield, the manipulation of democratic structures and aggressive chauvinism that Russia regularly deploys is, in the long term, more normal than not for a state that has struggled to tolerate a real civil society at any point in its history. Much like the ruthless control still exercised by the Chinese Communist Party, we can consider it to be deplorable but not catastrophic.
France, the UK and the USA, however, are supposedly the collective cradle of Western democracy, the nations that, quite literally, created the culture of codified constitutions and rights on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based. Even if, as we shall see, such a self-image has often been little more than an illusion, it has been a uniquely powerful one – not least in fuelling unhesitating global military and political interventions by all three countries. The current condition of these nations, challenged by powerful bottom-up movements that question all their previously assumed values of openness, does have the potential to be uniquely catastrophic, at least for those of us trapped within these states if not more widely still. How any part of the world would sustain support for democracy if all five permanent members of the UN Security Council were to become open, convinced and militant chauvinists is a question that does not bear too much reflection. Until recently, continued global economic and cultural leadership spared politicians in Washington, London and Paris from the need to confront where their national wealth came from, or how their languages came to dominate the world. Comforting illusions of progress concealed worsening symptoms of relative decline and internal divisions amounting to gross injustice. As economic progress has so visibly come to a halt in the past decade, stripping away that illusion of inexorable improvement, delusion has taken its place. Declarations that immigration can simply be halted, that long-dead industries can be restarted, that crumbling infrastructure can be replaced overnight, and a generous welfare state upheld and extended for the right sort of citizens, have abounded.
These claims, coming from the right and the far-right of the political spectrum, draw the natural condemnation of others further to the left. But it is important to recognise that this is not merely a continuation of old ideological struggles: these developments are even more dangerous because they are self-destructively mistaken. They are detached from the actual history of how our societies took on their current social, economic and cultural forms; and they are wrong about where those societies fit into the world around them. They make no more sense than a dementia sufferer demanding that his carers let him get the train to work in his pyjamas. Just as a confused eighty-yearold cannot bend the world to his perception, so a Brexiting Britain or ‘Great Again’ America cannot return old prosperity to their rustbelts by willing it to happen. This dimension of sheer wish-fulfilment is often neglected in the anguished debates that have raged on the liberal left over what to do for, with or about the ‘working class’ that has voted for such things. A language that articulates ‘legitimate concerns’ about the negative impacts of immigration and globalisation has often resulted, while often neglecting the extent to which such concerns are rehashings of tabloid myths and undisguised racial prejudice. But whether or not the anxieties and desires of these groups are justified in anyone’s eyes by their current experiences matters not at all. They are the deluded product of a detachment from historical context that renders them almost literally meaningless. Following through with these ideas will produce only an ever-accelerating spiral of crisis and suffering, even for those who support them most ardently.
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