Dahrendorf, Ralph (1929– )

The author of close to thirty books including Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and Society and Democracy in Germany (1967), Dahrendorf's most influential contributions to sociology include the conceptual elaboration of factors affecting the likelihood of group conflict (see social conflict), which are empirically variable across time and place; an attendant critique of Karl Marx's universalizing of his historically narrow analysis of class conflict in nineteenthcentury Europe; an insistence on the analytical differentiation of industrialism from capitalism; and a concern with formal variations in types of organization and association, in types of authority relations, in patterns of conflict regulation, and in relations of stratification along a number of axes.

Dahrendorf is popularly known as a “conflict theorist” but in fact has always refused to oversimplify reality through exaggerating tendencies of integration (as, for example, in functionalism) or of conflict (as, for example, in Marx). He is an anti-utopian who urges people to have the maturity to live with complexity. To emphasize this complexity, he has drawn attention throughout his work to the relatively independent nature of many aspects of social life, from those specific to international relations, industrial society, politics, and nuclear weapons, through divergent forms of ownership and control to, latterly, those related to the environment and to biological issues associated with genetic engineering, to name just some. His sociology is marked deeply by a political commitment to liberal values and to the welfare state, to both liberty and citizenship entitlements.

Dahrendorf has combined his intellectual work with a hugely impressive presence in the practical worlds of both politics and academic administration. At the end of the 1960s he was a Free Democrat (FDP) member of the German Bundestag and a parliamentary secretary of state at the Foreign Office, then a European Commissioner in Brussels in 1970–4, before becoming the Director of the London School of Economics in 1974–84. 1987 to 1997 he was Warden of St. Anthony's College, Oxford. He was created a United Kingdom life peer in 1993. ROB STONES

Darwin, Charles (1809–1882)

The theory of natural selection was developed independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace (1823–1913).