Introduction

This chapter explains the importance of the neglected concept of Max Weber's original idea of Lebenschancen (life chances; LCs) and Ralf Dahrendorf's comprehensive analysis of the idea's theoretical and empirical importance. Dahrendorf's sociology of LCs includes a number of significant concepts relevant to society in the twenty- first century in particular his idea that LCs are a function of options (O) and ligatures (L). While these concepts provide the basis for Dahrendorf's theoretical argument, it is important to explain how these abstractions are relevant to improving the LCs of ordinary people. The life- chance concept, defined in ordinary language by Gerth and Mills is the chance to stay alive after birth, to remain healthy and grow tall, and if sick to grow well again quickly and to avoid becoming a juvenile delinquent, and very crucially, the chance to complete an intermediary or higher educational grade.

For Dahrendorf and many contemporary sociologists, education is the key to achieving a decent standard of living for individuals based on material resources and a good quality of life, typically characterised by the ubiquitous term ‘lifestyle’.

In developing countries, however, the quest for better LCs is about achieving lower rates of morbidity and living longer, that is, the political economy of survival. The philosopher and economist Amartya Sen is perhaps the most prominent writer on enhancing the LCs of people in the developing world. His work on the Capability Approach (CA) has some resemblances to Dahrendorf's model in that CA is ‘much concerned with the opportunities that people have to improve the quality of their lives […]. The crucial role of social opportunities is to expand the realm of agency and freedom’. The options that a person has depend greatly on relations with others and on what the state and other institutions do.’ As I see it, expanding the realm of agency and freedom corresponds to Dahrendorf's idea of liberty as the expansion of people's options and opportunities or LCs; the relations with others which Dahrendorf refers to as ligatures or networks and what I argue in Part III are available to people through social movement (SM) participation.