Ralf Dahrendorf

Ralf Dahrendorf was a German-British sociologist and liberal politician known for his conflict-theoretic critique of Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism. In Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) he argued that Parsons's emphasis on consensus and equilibrium obscured the persistence of authority relations and conflicting interests in modern industrial society, and he proposed a revised theory of class based on differential access to authority within organizations rather than solely on ownership of the means of production, as in classical Marxist theory. Dahrendorf combined his academic sociology with an active career in politics and public life in both Germany and the United Kingdom, including service as a European Commissioner and director of the London School of Economics.