Recollections of Ralf Dahrendorf

By Will Hertz

As assistant secretary of the Foundation who attended all open board meetings, my most vivid memory of Ralf Dahrendorf was the day he lectured Henry Ford. As I recall the incident, Ford was holding forth on the wastefulness of spending grant funds on the poor and disadvantaged. Their housing, food and other economic problems, he argued. were beyond the funding resources of even the Ford Foundation.

Henry Dahrendorf countered, the underlying problem facing the poor is their their lack of political and social power to effectively address their economic problems. The Foundation may not have enough funds to make a dent in their food, housing and other economic needs, but it can help them strengthen their position in the political and social arena. I don't recall Ford's having an answer.

I saw another side of Dahrendorf's mind when in the late 1970s I accompanied the Board on a field trip that started in the South Bronx, involved a boat trip down the East River to the Battery, and ended with a feast in China Town. On the boat trip, I found myself on deck with Dahrendorf staring at the passing scene. I was surprised to learn, however, that the object of his attention was not the skyscrapers but the bridges over the East River.

By Frank Sutton

Ralf Dahrendorf's death this past month was reported in obituaries in the New York Times and the Economist, and his death brought memories of him as a European public figure, as sociologist, and as a trustee of the Ford Foundation.

Dahrendorf first came into my acquaintance as a brilliant young German sociologist in the years after World War II. I was then a young sociologist at Harvard , where Talcott Parsons was using European founders of the subject, Durkheim, Pareto, and Max Weber to shape it in this country. The great German sociologist, Max Weber, was particularly associated with the idea that there could and should be a sociology that was value-free, or Wertfrei, as we learned to say in deference to the idea's Weberian and European origins. When we came into acquaintance with the new generation of European social scientists after the war--notably at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in 1948 and subsequent years--we were naturally much interested in what the new Europeans thought of this kind of sociology. Dahrendorf was already a rising star and I remember disappointment among Harvard contemporaries about his resistance to what was coming back across the Atlantic. It was not that he was a narrow German; indeed he was early a student at the London School of Economics, where he would rise to its top some years later. He was also impatiently on his way to becoming a prominent figure in German and European public affairs. As a man deeply engaged in current affairs, it was no doubt natural that he should deviate from the more detached sociology we were doing at Harvard.

It was not until the 1970s that I saw Ralf Dahrendorf regularly. He came in 1975 as a member of the Ford Foundation board, replacing John Loudon, who was chairman of Royal Dutch Shell,and had been the first European on our board. For us in the International Division, having a European on the board was obviously of great interest . By the time Dahrendorf came to us he had been not only a professor of sociology at several universities; he had also been a German politician in the Free Democratic Party, a member of the German parliament, a member of the European Commission in Brussels, and not long before had been made the director of the London School of Economics. He had kept a busy academic life but had reached out into a wide-ranging public one.

It is ironic that we had European trustees only in the years after the Foundation's most active concern with Europe. In the early years when John J. McCloy and Shepard Stone carried on the interests they had begun when McCloy was High Commissioner in Germany, the Foundation had a lively engagement with Atlantic relations and encouraged the rise of the European Common Market. In the years to 1966 Stone directed an active program of European and Atlantic grants, but after McGeorge Bundy become the Foundation president, there was shift to less political concerns with Europe and more emphasis on the common problems of developed countries. By the time Ralf Dahrendorf came on the board the Foundation was struggling through the stagflation of the 1970s, cutting budgets, and finding it harder to maintain many of its grant programs. In the Foundation's early years Europe had still been needy, but by the Seventies it had risen to prosperity through great boom years, and Ford trustees like Robert McNamara thought it rich enough that the Foundation's international grants should go to poorer places. Bundy's vision of a broad concern linking US with other developed countries in their common problems withered too, as budgets had to be squeezed.

Thus, Ralf Dahrendorf came to us at a time when his knowledge and stature as a leading European had less scope for application than they might have had in an earlier era. The Foundation kept up its concern with the poor countries, but whereas his predecessor, John Loudon, had been a ready and vigorous supporter of the Foundation's assistance programs, Dahrendorf had some of the doubts about aid and techical assistance that grew in those years. The new nations the Foundation was helping develop were hardly models of freedom and democracy, matters to which Dahrendorf had a lifelong devotion. He was consequently a less enthusiastic supporter of the International Division's development programs than other international board members had been. We had a growing interest in international affairs in those years, in the economic crises of the 1970s, a revived interest in security and arms control and other subjects familiar to a head of LSE. But Dahrendorf's personal history and his devotion to freedoms and democracy may have found more stimulating business in the Foundation's domestic agenda in the Bundy era.

Maybe it was because of my wondering how to deal with this newer trustee, that my wife gave me one of his books, Society and Democracy in Germany , as a Christmas present a couple of years after he arrived. A recent return to it brought recall of his early and brave resistance to the Hitler's Nazi movement, and his concern with building and keeping democracy in Germany and elsewhere. It also confirmed old views on his sociology; this was not the book of a Wertfrei sociologist as we had tried to be , but the passionate writing of a man fully engaged in current social and politicial issues, however learned and professional his use of sociological expertise.

Dahrendorf was a voluble man both orally and in the thirty or forty books he has left to posterity. In our boardroom he sometimes reminded us of the loquacity of Judge Wyzanski in an earlier era. In an autobiographical talk in Lucerne a few years ago, he said his favorite book was his history of the London School of Economics, entitled, simply, LSE (1995) . It is indeed a rich and engaging account of the institution he led (something that has not been achieved by the head of a big New York foundation since Raymond Fosdick told the story of the Rockefeller foundation in 1952.) It is both a reminder of the importance of LSE in the countries and international affairs that Ford programs were devoted to, and also of how naturally its director might serve as a Ford trustee. Dahrendorf recounts Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous 1975 Commentary article alleging that the US faced an opposition in the UN and elsewhere from the new nations whose leaders had learned British socialism at LSE, and has rather a lot of fun parading these national leaders who actually went to LSE, sorting out their dispositions toward the US and socialism.

I last saw Dahrendorf as a Ford trustee when we shared a trip through the Nairobi game park with Robert McNamara and others at the end of a board meeting in Nairobi in 1983. Somewhat later when I was interim president of the Social Science Research Council he agreed to serve on the Plans and Policy Committee that was our principal policy organ. After rather short service he resigned, telling me he was happier on the Ford board than with this more squabbling academic committee. But he was by no means through with academic posts. After LSE, Dahrendorf went back to Konstanz University in Germay but soon retrned to Oxford as the Warden of St. Antony's College, a college to which the Foundation had made a major contribution for its basic endowment in the 1960s. St. Antony's has been of special and continuing interest to the Foundation as a leading British center of studies of foreign areas. I missed an appointment to talk with Dahrendorf about our experiences with area studies during a visit to Oxford in the 1990s (because of an accident on the rail line from London!). Since then I have only followed at second hand his career in the House of Lords as Lord Dahrendorf of Clare Market, and as a busy public intellectual all across Europe in the last decades .

I was not alone among officers of the Foundation in my time who couldn't be sure how Dahrendorf would react to their plans and projects. He was a man of too restless intellect and varied convictions to be counted on as a sure supporter. But we have surely needed distinguished Europeans like him among us, and one trusts successors from the other side of the water will continue on the Foundation's board.