The Modern Social Conflict: An Essay on the Politics of Liberty

by Ralf Dahrendorf

The Modern Social Conflict offers a concise, authoritative, and accessible account of where the Western democracies stand today, how they got there, and where they must go if they are to retain their political and social freedom. Part history, part social analysis, part deeply committed prescription, this "essay on the Politics of Liberty" is a timely and important contribution to our understanding of the modern world by one of the most noted social and political thinkers of our day.

Genres: Political Science, Sociology, Economics, Philosophy

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician. A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analysing class divisions in modern society. Dahrendorf wrote multiple articles and books, his most notable being Class and Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and Essays in the Theory of Society (1968).

During his political career, he was a Member of the German Parliament, Parliamentary Secretary of State at the Foreign Office of Germany, European Commissioner for Trade, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Education and Member of the British House of Lords, after he was created a life peer in 1993. He was subsequently known in the United Kingdom as Lord Dahrendorf.

He served as director of the London School of Economics and Warden of St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He also served as a professor of sociology at a number of universities in Germany and the United Kingdom and was a research professor at the Berlin Social Science Research Center.

Reviews

[nettie · Rating 1 out of 5]

platí co jsem řekla poprvé, nesouhlasím s věcmi co týpek říká, ale nevím jestli jsou to jeho přesvědčení nebo ne.
mluvit o jiných formách konfliktu a jako příklad uvést nespokojené fotbalové fanoušky je fakt wild.

[Ying Yao · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terribly written piece. Maybe there are great ideas but the author compiled them in a awful way. Not good reading experience

[Iassen Lazarov · Rating 3 out of 5]

An important investigation in the mid 1990-s on the ways that the combination of economic growth and civic (individual, political and social) rights should coexist in order to build sustainable development within democratic societies. It reviews the main social conflicts in the West of the late XIX and the XX centuries, but it lacks contextualisation and examples. This makes the book very hard to read as it remains mainly in the field of abstract ideas and revisions of important political philosophers and economists. Thus - if the reader doesn't have some previous knowledge/degree in the field, he'll probably feel lost on many occasions in the text.