Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory

by Ralf Dahrendorf

German

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

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.