Sir Ralf Dahrendorf Interview:Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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How did this formative experience influence the topics that you wound up looking at? I know that one issue that has been of great concern to you is the problem of liberal democracy and why it did not take root in Germany.
That's certainly true, although the book which I wrote about it is somewhat later. The book [Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society] was written in 1965, and it was based on lectures which I'd first given at Columbia University in New York in 1960, and certainly that was one of my subjects.
Before that, I suppose my fundamental interest was in an approach to society and to the world in which we are living which I would describe as a Kantian, eighteenth century. The core of that approach was my firm belief that the regulation of conflict is the secret of liberty in liberal democracy. That if we don't manage to regulate conflict, if we try to ignore it, or if we try to create a world of ultimate harmony, we are quite likely to end up with worse conflicts than if we accept the fact that people have different interests and different aspirations, and devise institutions in which it is possible for people to express these differences, which is what democracy, in my view, is about. Democracy, in other words, is not about the emergence of some unified view from "the people," but it's about organizing conflict and living with conflict. That was my first fairly well-known book, on class and class conflict.
In the Germany book [Society and Democracy in Germany] I applied this to German history. I tried to point out that very often in German history, people had had an unfortunate tendency to look for the one answer, the great leader who has all answers, or a system which brings about a unified, harmonious view -- which, in fact, means that some arrogate to themselves the assumption that they have the one view, and many interests can't be expressed. So there was a relationship between the class book and the Germany book.
What did you find were the conditions that made this possibility for managed conflict a reality?
I've often been charged with having applied, even at the time, the British and American experience to German history, which is undoubtedly true. But it is in Britain and America that these conditions were most evident, and that it was accepted that there were, on balance, two major groups -- those who had something to lose, and therefore by and large defended the status quo, and those who had little to lose and certainly a lot to gain, and therefore argued for change. And these two social and political groups dominated a system which we have come to call democracy. Now Germany, on the other hand, kept, throughout industrialization, what is often called an "authoritarian" group, a more traditional ruling or upper-class group, which sort of set the tone and decided everything and didn't recognize the interplay of the haves and the have-nots, or, as I put it before, those who had something to lose and were on the defensive and those who had aspirations.
What has it been like for you having had this formative experience, having focused on this problem of conflict management and the salvation of liberal values, to deal with a period like the sixties and the early seventies -- the youth protests that we witnessed at that time? What was your reaction, not so much in terms of the policies that you were able to apply, but in terms of your feelings and your intellectual sensibilities?
Can I say first of all that throughout the period that we've been talking about, certainly since 1948, I sort of straddled cultures and spent some time in Germany, but a lot of time in Britain and, indeed in all, about two years in the United States as well. So I had some sense about what was going on in different parts of the world that was relevant to me. But the 1960s were very much my German years. I suppose many people would say today that in that period I was one of the spokesmen of protest. But the Left wouldn't say that. The young wouldn't say that.
Because, while I was involved with them in this permanent debate, and it was almost like a traveling circus, one went from one university to another, from one place to another, it was very often the same people on the stage, some representatives of the students (I almost said, "of the revolting students," but I quite liked them), and some representatives of a slightly older generation who nevertheless believed that it was necessary to engage in debates. So the sixties to me were a period of almost continuous debate. In my lectures at the University of Tübingen I had up to 2,000 students. I had talked about democracy in Germany, about conflict, about these subjects -- it was one of the topical subjects. So partly within the university and partly outside, a decade of debate. And I was one of those who argued that it wasn't good enough to have rebuilt the country after the war, it wasn't good enough to have a period of economic growth. After reconstruction, "reform" was one of the slogans I remember well, one of the slogans which I actually stood for. (I'm not in the seventies yet, I'm still in the sixties.)
Yes, and because your career is so rich and varied, we're going to have to move back and forth. But because we have an American audience, a California audience, I wanted to clarify one point in the sense that you are a "classical liberal." You are a member of the Liberal Party of West Germany, and that involves a commitment to certain civil rights, political rights, and social rights. I want to clarify that point and any comment that you would make to help an American audience understand that agenda, which was the Liberal agenda, which was in part, undoubtedly, the agenda that you were defending in these controversies.
Yes, I'm glad you make the point because the dreaded "L-word" isn't at all dreaded in Europe, and certainly not for me. But it means something slightly different from liberalism in this country. You see, I've come out of a Social Democratic family which really means, out of a family which was in favor of social reform, of the welfare state, of providing more opportunities for a wider group of people. And I've always subscribed to that idea but, contrary to the Social Democratic tradition out of which I came and into which I had originally grown, I have always placed the greater emphasis on individual life chances.
Individual life chances. Now this to me involves, above all, two things, one that I share with Social Democrats, which the insistence on human rights (individual rights and civil rights) which I think is of fundamental importance, is a universal proposition, is true everywhere in the world, but is something which one has to defend at home, and has a lot to do with my youth, childhood, and the totalitarian experience. It's a sort of gut reaction that one defends individual rights wherever they are in jeopardy.
The other is that social order, or social structure, has to offer a combination of a breadth of opportunities and a sense of citizenship for all. A combination, in other words, of access by citizenship and of wide choices. I've always insisted on these choices as well as citizenship, and that, I think, is perhaps the liberal nuance. In my own thinking and, to some extent, in European liberal thinking, it's a traditional reformist liberalism, a liberalism which is in favor of changes which offer more opportunities for choice as well as more rights for everybody. It's that particular combination which I have espoused.
The party to which I belong hasn't always, and certainly not entirely, subscribed to my views. Indeed, there probably isn't a party which subscribes to these views in its entirety. I've always been a bit of a loner, although, when I went into politics in 1967, I, for a variety of reasons which I can't fully explain, very quickly rose to a certain amount of visibility and prominence.
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