Thinking
Citizenship Series
Ralf Dahrendorf on citizenship and life
chances
Bryan
S. Turner*
Wellesley
College, Wellesley, MA, USA
(Received
17 September 2009; final version received 22 November 2009)
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 societies to manage and
regulate the conflicts arising out of the class structure. In this regard, his
work on social conflict combined Marx’s economic sociology with Max Weber’s
analysis of power. Rejecting Marx’s definition of class in terms of property ownership
as too narrow, Dahrendorf saw class through the lens of Weber’s analysis of authority.
Classes can be conceptualized in terms of those who give orders and those who take
orders. Every institution contained this dynamic tension between those with and
those without authority. He went on to define social classes as ‘conflict
groups arising out of the authority structure of imperatively coordinated
associations’ (Dahrendorf 1959, p. 206). Revolutionary conflicts are likely to
emerge when these contradictions, existing in a wide range of separate
institutional settings, converge and coalesce. Modern capitalism had to be analyzed
therefore in terms of the balance between these authority mechanisms, unequal wealth
distribution and the enhancement of life chances made possible by citizenship.
Capitalist
societies had, however, been transformed by the social struggle for rights and
hence capitalist societies had to be understood in terms of a constant tussle
between class and citizenship. In this respect, Dahrendorf was deeply
influenced by the work of T.H. Marshall, who as a professor at the LSE had ‘an
almost uncanny knack of intuitively hitting the sociological level of
discourse’ (Dahrendorf 1995, p. 376). Marshall (1950) had developed a model of
social rights in Britain in his famous Cambridge lecture on citizenship and
social class. Dahrendorf extended Marshall’s approach by looking at the
processes by which industrial conflict had become institutionalized in trade
union organizations, wage negotiations, industrial bargains, and legislation
relating to strikes and lockouts. Out of these processes, a new social contract
had emerged between the capitalist class and the working class. Although this
social contract was unstable and open to constant contestation, it had
converted open class struggle into industrial conflict through an industrial
relations policy. The potential war between classes with opposed interests had
been avoided by the pragmatic evolution of trade unionism and wage bargaining,
and as a result ‘reformism’ rather than revolution had characterized the
history of twentieth century Britain (Turner 1986). One negative feature of
this pragmatic approach to politics was the creeping influence of bureaucracy
in industrial society. In order to understand these organizations, Dahrendorf,
borrowing again from Weber, coined the expression ‘imperatively coordinated
associations’ and he offered his now famous definition: ‘classes are social
conflict groups the determinant (or differentia specifica) of which can be
found in the participation in or exclusion from the exercise of authority
within any imperatively coordinated association’ (Dahrendorf 1959, p. 138). In
more general terms and in response to his experiences as a Commissioner in the
European Union, Dahrendorf came to see the vested interests of bureaucracy as a
major hurdle, not only to industrial efficiency, but to the enjoyment of
personal liberties.
Although
the expansion of citizenship had greatly increased the scope of social rights, the
tension between rights and the actual enjoyment of life chances has remained an
unresolved aspect of capitalism. His sociology was therefore devoted to
understanding the development of abstract entitlements and their actual
realization by ordinary citizens. He called this tension between provisions and
entitlements ‘the Martinez paradox’. In a visit to Nicaragua in March 1986,
Dahrendorf observed that, despite the successes of the Sandinistan struggle,
the shops were empty and people could not get basic goods and services.
Alejandro Martinez, the Nicaraguan Minister for Foreign Trade, summed up the situation
by saying that before the revolution the shops were full of goods, but people could
not afford them and now, after the revolution, the people could afford the
goods, but there was nothing in the shops for the people to buy. The revolution
had ‘transformed a world of plenty for the few into one of little for all’
(Dahrendorf 2008, p. 7). While capitalist development tends to produce economic
growth without redistribution, the twentieth-century dilemma for socialism was
redistribution without economic growth. For Dahrendorf, real social advancement
had to mean the combination of both provision and entitlement. He remained
skeptical about the extent to which the evolution of the social rights of
citizenship could do much fundamentally to change social class inequalities. He
concluded, ‘Whatever citizenship does to class, it does not eliminate either
inequality or conflict. It changes their quality’ (Dahrendorf 2008, p. 44).
This analysis of the Martinez paradox led Dahrendorf to a skeptical view of the
potential of revolutions to change significantly the fortunes of the industrial
working class and peasantry, because revolutions ‘are never very helpful for
economic progress’ (Dahrendorf 1990, p. 81). Revolutions may be exciting but
they do little for confidence, productivity and innovation, all of which are
necessary for economic growth.
Dahrendorf
also remained conscious of another problem in contemporary citizenship, namely
the contradiction between inclusion and exclusion. Despite recent debates about
the possibility of flexible citizenship or post-national citizenship as a
response to the complexities of multicultural societies, Dahrendorf insisted
that citizenship could not be separated from the state. In ‘late-modern
citizenship’ we are called upon to think creatively about social obligation and
identity in ‘social wholes’ that extend well beyond the nation state (White
2009). Against much contemporary thinking on the subject, Dahrendorf was
adamant that
the alliance of nationalism and
liberalism was a force for emancipation during the revolutionary decades from
1789 to 1848. To this day, no other guarantee of the rule of law has come to
the fore than the nation-state, its constitution of checks and balances, due
process, and judicial review. Not the least advantage of the nation-state was
that it generalized the ancient idea of citizenship. (Dahrendorf 2008, p. 28)
