"The New Liberty: Survival and Justice in a Changing World" by Ralf Dahrendorf

Ralf Dahrendorf (1929 - 2009) was an extraordinary figure. He was a leading sociological thinker, university administrator, politician and diplomat at various times in his life. As a teenager he had been imprisoned for distributing anti-Nazi literature in Berlin during the Second World War, but unlike many who took that phenomenally brave step, Dahrendorf was no communist sympathiser. He devoted his life to the cause of liberalism, studying it, developing theories about it and proseletysing for it both in and outside the university world. He divided his life between England (specifically London and Oxford) and his native Germany, with sizeable further stretches as a visiting academic in the USA. He was a member of the Bundestag for a period, a German government minister, a European Commissioner and, later in life, a member of the House of Lords in Westminster.

In 1974, at the height of the economic, political and industrial relations crises that ensued as a result of oil price hikes of the previous year, Ralf Dahrendorf was invited by the BBC to give that year's Reith Lectures. Named after the corporations first Director General, Sir John Reith, this series of six half hour talks had been given annually by a prominent public intellectual since 1948, as they still are today, and broadcast on Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service) and the World Service. It was thus a very high profile and prestigious invitation. Then Director of the London School of Economics, Dahrendorf chose to give his talks on the prospects for liberty in a time of economic uncertainty. Fifty years ago this week, extended versions of his six lectures were published in this book by Routledge.

They are somewhat frustrating to read, because Dahrendorf was always more comfortable theorising and taking in generalities, than he was setting out any kind of serious programme for action, but they are still worth reading as an accessible window into some of his social and political thinking - sometimes characterised as 'radical centrism'. He was very much a post-Marxist thinker and one primarily concerned with the way in which the rise of large corporations, powerful trade unions and managed bureaucracies were becoming vested interests, capitalising on economic uncertainty to hold others back and hence to deny them liberty and choice about how they lived their lives. He wanted to see fundamental change in workplaces so that people were encouraged to study while working, take on more than one part-time job at the same time and retire happily at a later date because they were highly satisfied with their working lives. Most of all he wanted to see a switch in focus away from 'expansion' as the principal government economic objective (ie: growth) and towards 'improvement', by which he meant the quality of human life. It is all a touch idealistic and not a little impractical, but a useful contribution and highly thought-provoking nonetheless.

Ralf Dahrendorf had a magnificent turn of phrase, using wonderful metaphors to get his key points across. This lovely quote, quite possibly reflecting his own experiences, concerns the practical difficulties associated with being invited to lead a bureaucratic organisation at a time when significant change is required:

"So far as the heads of bureaucratic organisations, ministers and presidents and sometimes directors are concerned, they find themselves confronted with a variant of the re-entry problem in space travel. It is a problem of the exact angle at which they dive into the thicker atmosphere of the organisation while remaining intact and alive themselves. If the angle is too steep, the leader burns up in the organisation, becomes part of it, adopts its mores and fails to have an impact; the bureaucratisation of leadership. If, on the other hand, the angle is too flat, the space capsule may be thrown back into space, the leader never actually penetrates the organisation, but remains an isolated figurehead again without impact, brilliant perhaps, ineffectual certainly; leadership without relevance. And a similar case could be made for citizen participation which is fraught with the twin dangers of corruption by inclusion in the organisation on the one hand and ineffectiveness by deliberate distance on the other. We need bureaucracies in order to solve our problems, but once we have got them they effectively prevent us from doing so."