• DOI:10.1080/13621021003594973
• Corpus ID: 145360857

Ralf Dahrendorf on citizenship and life chances

@article{Turner2010RalfDO,
  title={Ralf Dahrendorf on citizenship and life chances},
  author={Bryan S. Turner},
  journal={Citizenship Studies},
  year={2010},
  volume={14},
  pages={237 - 244}
}

• B. Turner
• Published 1 April 2010
• History
• Citizenship Studies

Lord Dahrendorf died in Cologne on 17 June 2009. Born in Hamburg, he had enjoyed a long and remarkable career. As a teenager he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he emerged, half starving to death, in 1945. His PhD thesis in 1952 was a dissertation on Karl Marx’s conception of justice and he continued his studies at the LSE under Karl Popper as a Leverhulme Research Scholar in 1953–1954. He became a Free Democrat (FDP) member of the German Bundestag in 1969, a European Commissioner in Brussels (1970–1974), Director of the London School of Economics (1974–1984) and Warden of St Anthony’s College, Oxford (1987–1997). In 1995 Dahrendorf published his history of the LSE. From 1967 to 1970 he was the Chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Soziologie. He also served as a professor of sociology in a number of universities in Germany and Britain. Acquiring British citizenship in 1988, he became a life peer in 1993 as Baron Dahrendorf of Clare Market in the City of Westminster. In a period when Talcott Parsons’s sociology was influential on both sides of the Atlantic, Dahrendorf became associated, along with Professor John Rex (1961), with socalled ‘conflict sociology’. Marxist social theory remained an important theme in his subsequent approach to sociology although his analysis of social and political questions involved a constant revision of Marx’s ideas about capitalism. As a sociologist he made major contributions to social class analysis, role theory, the institutionalization of industrial conflict and the concept of the service class. The dominant theme of his sociological work was the relationship between social class and the limitations on life chances arising from economic inequalities. His Life chances (1979) attempted to combine a normative debate about individual liberty with the empirical study of life chances. One might say that he combined a passionate commitment to human liberty with a realistic sociological awareness of the limitations imposed on liberty by the enduring structure of modern capitalism. One of his most influential contributions to sociology was Class and class conflict in industrial society (1959) in which he argued that Europe had escaped the class war predicted in Marx’s sociology of revolution, because the development of citizenship had improved the lives of the working class in expanding their life chances, despite the continuity of overall social inequality. Capitalist society, he claimed, had changed radically with the ‘equalization of rights’ and ‘an extraordinary intensification of social mobility’ (Dahrendorf 1959, p. 105). A variety of institutions had emerged in European