RALF DAHRENDORF:AN ACADEMIC who dipped into politics, and a political activist who never lost sight of the intellectual and moral framework that had to underpin the day-to-day management of democracy, Ralf Dahrendorf, who has died at the age of 80, was one of the foremost sociologists of his generation.
But he was also a man of many parts who began life as a German profoundly marked by brief imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, and ended it as a life peer in the House of Lords. He moved at a dazzling pace from professorship to professorship, became the first foreign director of the London School of Economics (LSE), and acquired British citizenship in 1988 soon after he was made warden of St Antony's College in Oxford.
As a radical, he was more comfortable with Britain's Liberal Democrats than with Germany's FDP (Free Democratic party), which had propelled him into a brief stint in Willy Brandt's government. As an administrator, he emerged as a sharp critic of European Union bureaucracy after a four-year term as a member of the European Commission. Yet he was also a romantic who remained firmly committed to the EU as a guarantor of human rights and liberty.
While Dahrendorf was still living in Germany, his writings reflected his fear that the country's postwar institutions might not be strong enough to withstand a return to dictatorship. In the 1970s, settled in Britain, he focused on the class system, but concluded that economic progress had eroded many of the old divisions and had produced, on the one hand, a "citizen class" and, on the other, a marginalised "underclass".
Preoccupied by what he saw as the crisis of democracy at the end of the 20th century, Dahrendorf became emphatic that basic civil rights, including equality before the law and freedom of expression, must be given constitutional legitimacy. But he went further, arguing that modern citizenship must recognise unambiguous social rights to free people from insecurity and to ensure that they have education and that their incomes must not be allowed to fall below a certain level.
Such rights needed to be removed from party politics and constitutionally enshrined. To that end, Britain must have a Bill of rights and a written constitution.
In private, he was complex and restless. Modesty was not among his virtues. "One of my fundamental personal beliefs has always been that I must not do things that others can do equally well," he told an interviewer.
When the offer of a 10-year term as director of the LSE came in September 1973, Dahrendorf accepted with alacrity. The return to academia was welcome. To be singled out "as a scholar of worldwide reputation" to head a prestigious institution was gratifying. He knew that he would have to work hard to establish his authority and win acceptance among LSE's star-studded academics and with the school's radical student body.
When he took up the post the following spring, the BBC invited him to deliver that year's Reith lectures. His chosen theme was Survival and Justice in a Changing World.
In 1993 he received a life peerage. and in 1995 he produced his History of the London School of Economics.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. By his first wife, Vera, a fellow student at LSE, he had three daughters, Nicola, Alexandra and Daphne. In 1980, he married, secondly, Ellen, and thirdly, in 2004, Christiane. She and his daughters survive him.
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Ralf Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, sociologist and politician, born May 1st, 1929; died June 17th, 2009.