Dahrendorf, Ralf

Ralf Dahrendorf's sociological lifework is the result not only of an analytical debate with Karl Marx and Max Weber, on the one hand, and with Talcott Parsons, on the other, but also of the link between politics and science, which he cared about all his life. He rubbed up against Marx; he oriented himself toward Weber; he found his place in the social sciences of the twentieth century by differentiating himself from Parsons; and he unwaveringly tried to advocate freedom in active politics and detected conflict as the creative force of human history. In his opinion, “civil society” is the most reliable anchor of freedom, because besides political democracy and free-market economy it renders the necessary stability to “the building of freedom.”

Dahrendorf's scientific and political career is as successful as it is extraordinary: He taught sociology in Hamburg, Tübingen, and Constance. He was the director of the London School of Economics (1974–1984); warden of St. Antony's College, in Oxford (1987–1997); commissioner of the European Community in Brussels (1970–1974); and since 1993, he has been a member of the British House of Lords, as the Lord of Clare Market, in the City of Westminster. The crossing of borders—be it between occupations, nations, parties, or between social science and value judgement—has become his life's motto.

In his sociological analyses, Dahrendorf points out that society is always characterized by two faces that unite static and dynamic components, integration and conflict. Nevertheless, both sides are by no means structures that are self-understood and closed, but “two equally valid aspects of every imaginable society” (Dahrendorf 1958:175). Hence, he focuses on an extension and overcoming of the structural-functional theory wherever its claim of universality hides the immanent capacity of explaining social change and conflict. However, at no time is the systemic approach as a useful instrument of analysis discarded. However, Dahrendorf (1959) wants to prove, against the structural-functional primacy of integration, that “the ‘dynamically variable elements’which influence the construction of social structures do not necessarily originate outside the ‘system’ but may be generated by the structure itself” (p. 123).

Next in Dahrendorf's development of a theory competing with structural functionalism is the introduction of the notions of power and authority. He assumes that conflict, social change, and societal dynamics originate from power relations. The “basic phenomenon of social conflict” is “not only to be found within established social structures, but above all in ‘normal’ elements of the social structure, i.e. in relations that are present in any society at any time” (Dahrendorf 1958:216). For this purpose, he depicts authority, beside the categories of norm and sanction, as a basic concept of sociology. In agreement with Weber (1980:28), he defines authority as “the probability that a command with a specific given content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.” In contrast to power, authority as imperative coordination is not only legitimized but also bound to positions, not to individuals; thus, power represents only a factual relation, while “authority is the legitimate relation of domination and subjection” (Dahrendorf 1959:166).

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