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Twenty‐Five Years of Socio‐Political Analysis: Notes and Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Ralf Dahrendorf
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SOCIO-POLITICAL ANALYSIS – SIT VENIA VERBO! – HAS TO DO with our experience of political development and its social foundations. Needless to say, our experience influences the way in which we see such development. It is not arrogant to add that this was never more true than in the changing circumstances of Europe in the last half-century.

A personal note may be regarded as generational, social, national as well. Before my eighteenth birthday I experienced both 20 July 1944 and the forced merger of Social Democrats and Communists in East Germany in the spring of 1946. In both cases, my father was in opposition, though in very different kinds of opposition. In the first instance, opposition from outside; being an insider, a member of the Reichstag, was a distant memory, though one to be revived at any moment, if the coup d'état succeeded. In the second instance, opposition from inside; a clear sense, as Deputy Chairman of the East German Social Democrats, that a new totalitarianism was just around the corner, after the brief euphoria of 1945. In both cases, moral victory and practical defeat, prison, exile. Such experiences need no interpretation.

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Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 15 , Issue 3-4 , 01 July 1980 , pp. 308 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1980

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