Abstract

This essay sets out to reflect on Dahrendorf’s legacy from a particular angle: the one the author himself proposed in the address he delivered on the occasion of the conferral of the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize for the ethical dimension in advanced societies, on 30 March 1992. What makes this line of analysis interesting is that Dahrendorf, in questioning the reasons that led to the prize being awarded to him, proceeds along an autobiographical thread, outlining the most significant stages of his contribution to scientific and public debate from the privileged standpoint of the moral striving towards a better society. It is like standing before an author’s reckoning with himself, before an intellectual and moral bequest brought into focus while he is still alive. The analysis, or rather the self-analysis, stops in 1992, but this is a date by which the arc of his thought had already undergone its most mature developments, and it is also a date of strategic significance: in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the communist regimes, it calls into play hopes of new freedoms and of a new agenda for the expansion of citizenship, whose constructive and purposeful impetus this essay intends to recover.

On more than one occasion, over the long course of a career heedless of boundaries, as sociologist, politician and publicist, Dahrendorf had occasion to reflect in autobiographical vein on his own life and intellectual experience. One thinks of the wide-ranging interview he gave in 1982 to the Italian-language Swiss broadcaster in Lugano (transcribed and published in 1984 under the title Autoritratto) and of the monograph Oltre le frontiere. Frammenti di una vita, which appeared in its German edition twenty years later (2004 [2002]). The autobiographical approach is shared, too, by “one of his finest short pieces, that Morality, Institutions and Civil Society with which he accepted the Agnelli Prize in 1992 […], a truly masterly summula of his thought” (Zincone and Gastaldo 2009: 8). It is a text, delivered in Italian on the evening of the award, that the New York Review of Books chose not to publish, as it had, by contrast, for the lectures of the prize’s previous recipients, Isaiah Berlin and Amartya Sen, thereby occasioning a “brief and restrained disappointment” in the author (ibid.). The original Italian version is held at the Fondazione Agnelli in Turin^[i], but Dahrendorf showed that he cared about a wider circulation of that address, which found other avenues of publication, in both English and Italian^[ii].

Reflecting, more than ten years after his death, on the legacy of Lord Ralf, the text in question proves to be of strategic interest: the Senator Giovanni Agnelli International Prize was explicitly dedicated to the “ethical dimension in advanced societies”, and this prompts in Dahrendorf a retrospective analysis aimed at bringing into focus the most significant stages of his contribution to scientific and public debate, from the privileged standpoint of the moral striving towards a better society. The occasion, in his view, justified “proceeding along a more autobiographical thread”, in particular by outlining the path towards his “personal discovery of the values of citizenship” (2005b [1992]: 56)^[iii].

It is precisely in the concept of citizenship that he sees a summing-up of what he identifies as the three pillars of an open society^[iv]: morality, institutions and civil society. Morality, significantly placed first, defines the ends to be aimed at and inspires not only “the norms of correctness and civility in everyday life, but also the desire to see better life chances extended to all human beings, and the actions that stem from this desire” (2005b [1992]: 56); institutions are the instrument for achieving that improvement, providing the rules of the game through which different aspirations can confront one another and find a legitimate path to realisation, as well as the possibility of making decisive changes of political programme in a legal and bloodless manner (democratic institutions, for example, allow us to elect but subsequently also to remove those by whom we are governed); finally, civil society “provides the lifeblood of freedom” and, through the “creative chaos of associations” (2005b [1992]: 56) of which it is composed, opens up opportunities for people’s self-determination, meets their plural needs for belonging, and shields them from possible interference by, or dependence on, the State.

It is interesting to note how Dahrendorf prefers to speak of “morals” and “morality”, even though the Agnelli Prize is conferred for contributions to the “ethical” dimension in advanced societies. He himself sets out the reasons for this preference, which rests in part on his cultural formation (he cites Smith and the Scottish moral philosophers of the eighteenth century, Kant and Durkheim) and derives in part from a greater regard for what we have inherited from the Romans rather than from the Greeks. “We Europeans have, I believe, inherited our civilisation from Rome, not from Athens. Virgil, not Homer, is the father of the West” (2005b [1992]: 54). The choice thus falls on mores rather than on ἦθος. As an intellectual who does not entrench himself in the empyrean of theory but takes the field, even “getting his hands dirty” with politics in order to foster concrete action, Dahrendorf admires Cicero, with his reflections on public life, and the jurists of the Emperor Justinian, with their studies of legal norms, more than the refined Greek poets. The “gift of Rome to the West” (2005b [1992]: 55) seems to him aptly summed up by the title of a celebrated treatise on the teaching of law: Justinian’s Institutiones.

It is therefore no accident, given such leanings, that his life choices led him to Great Britain, described as a “modern Rome”, to the point of applying for and obtaining its citizenship in 1988, as he is keen to point out. He feels a profound affinity with that tradition of “eminently practical” thinkers born on the soil of Albion, Locke, Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill and Keynes, “who did not set out to transform the whole world, still less to rebuild an imagined Arcadia, but to improve essential aspects of the real conditions of real people, here and now” (2005b [1992]: 55). This is exactly Lord Ralf’s approach, and the very heart of the moral striving of his path as a scholar.

Consistent with this outlook, he chooses to reflect on the three key concepts he has singled out (morality, institutions, civil society) not in the abstract, but by retracing key episodes of his own experience, which interweave with dates and historical events of wider significance and reverberate through his intellectual output.

The journey begins by recalling an early essay, Homo Sociologicus, written in 1957 and centred on the history, meaning and critique of the category of social role (Dahrendorf 1966 [1959]). The most innovative aspect of that work, which won its author appreciation among young students, lay precisely in its searching critical analysis of the concept in question. Sociological man, that is, man, and woman, as a bearer of social roles, is “an alienated creature”, subject to the pressure of expectations and to the bonds and constraints that society imposes upon him. Dahrendorf brought to light a “vexatious reality” of society at a time when mainstream sociology, Parsons docet, insisted on the importance of role integration and focused on conformity and consensus^[v].

This critical orientation was aimed at asserting that “the real, indeed moral, individual can and must be seen independently of all his social roles” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 57): he is heteronomous as a bearer of roles, but autonomous as a moral being, and this moral character “must be encouraged to fight the impositions of man’s ‘sociological shadow’” (2005b [1992]: 57).

From this there followed a conflict between the social and the moral, resolvable not in theory but in practice, in which the sociologist was urged to “cease to be an obstacle and to become an engine of the development of a society of free men” (2005b [1992]: 58).

Set against this stance, alongside the enthusiasm of the young, avid for action, were the misgivings of older and more experienced scholars. Dahrendorf reports a critical comment by Helmuth Plessner (1960), against which he had defended himself at the time, but which, more than thirty years on, strikes him as at least in part well founded: “If, in order to render the sphere of freedom unassailable, we identify it with that of privacy (and privacy, it should be added, in an extra-social sense), freedom loses all contact with reality and every possibility of social realisation” (2005b [1992]: 58). This was not exactly the thesis of the young Hamburger, but on one point the philosopher from Wiesbaden had hit the mark. The deep motivation of the argument developed in Homo Sociologicus can in fact be traced to the “insistence on the absolute character of certain fundamental values” (2005b [1992]: 59), first among them freedom. Faced with the defence of such absolute, non-negotiable values, one cannot come to a compromise: in many circumstances, the only valid morality is the ethics of conviction.

In the dialogue with Weber, discussing whether, according to conditions and spheres, to opt for the ethics of responsibility or the ethics of conviction, Dahrendorf’s autobiographical experience surfaces forcefully, together with his experience of the totalitarianisms (at the age of fifteen he was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis, feeling in his own flesh the real, genuine absence of freedom and, at the same time, an aching longing for it) (1984a: 29). Hence his distrust of, and even contempt for, those who, in the name of responsibility, in order to forestall the worst, came to terms with the totalitarian regimes, remained within them and supported them. For Dahrendorf the ethics of responsibility can become an excuse for “that cowardly attitude that has so amply characterised our century: collaboration” (2005b [1992]: 59)^[vi]. And it is the heirs of the collaborators, in his view, who pose the greatest problems of public morality in the post-communist countries of the 1990s.

As a politician as well as an intellectual, Dahrendorf certainly acknowledges that one must reckon with the complexity of the relations among means, ends and consequences, and he therefore does not rule out recourse to the ethics of responsibility, which is the ethics of politicians. But there are thresholds that cannot be crossed: towards governments that kill, torture, imprison without trial and suppress freedom of speech, only one reaction is possible, “that of unconditional repugnance and opposition” (2005b [1992]: 59).

Unfortunately it is not enough to place certain fundamental values in the sphere of what is absolute and cannot lend itself to the conditioning of social roles, as Dahrendorf had argued in Homo Sociologicus. One must also have the capacity to confront moral questions on a daily basis, in practical life, where things, for the most part, are not simply black or white. Often the shifts towards illiberal regimes come about insidiously, because they proceed slowly and gradually, and this makes it hard to identify the threshold that must not be crossed. The problem, then, is “knowing where to set the limit” (2005b [1992]: 59). Once again the moral education of the young Dahrendorf passes through an autobiographical episode: his father Gustav, deputy chairman of the Social Democratic Party in the East Germany of the immediate post-war years, knew exactly when the moment had come to say no (2005b [1992]: 59-60); he was able to realise that opening the way to negotiations for a merger with the Communist Party might lead once more to unfreedom, and so he dissented and left, putting his career, and more than that, at risk (Dahrendorf 1984a: 29). This took place on 11 February 1946, a date that remains symbolic in the scholar’s memory and that inspires in him, forty-five years later, a pregnant reflection on the theme of morality: beyond an inner adherence to certain fundamental values, it is essential to have the sensibility and the courage to recognise when the ethics of responsibility “must be abandoned and it becomes necessary to take a stand” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 60).

How closely the arguments of Homo Sociologicus were bound up with personal experience and with the experience of the totalitarianisms was not grasped at the time the essay was written and published, towards the end of the 1950s, in countries such as the United States and West Germany, where no totalitarian temptations were under way. Dahrendorf’s position at the time, which claimed for the individual an autonomous moral right to resist the “vexatious reality of society”, fell in with a collective mood that would end up inspiring the turbulent events of 1968. This is another key date in the Dahrendorfian intellectual and moral itinerary, from which a further “lesson” to be drawn from experience follows. For all the diversity of the forms it assumed in different countries, and the differences in the timing of the events connected with it, 1968 appears to be held together by a “strand anarchic in its aims and anomic in its effects”, by a “protest against society and its constraints in every respect and in every form” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 61). It was not only a matter of demands for greater democratisation in spheres such as the university, the family and work, but of the drive to abolish all authority, to have everything discussed by everyone. The lesson to be drawn from it is, for Dahrendorf, very clear-cut: “anomie is harmful to freedom” (2005b [1992]: 61); the absence or shortage of norms leads to disorientation and disorder, the frames of reference of values crumble, and freedom “is transformed into an existentialist nightmare, in which everything is permitted and nothing matters” (2005b [1992]: 61).

Drawing on Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which he had always admired, Sir Ralf stresses the drawbacks of the state of nature, anarchic in itself, and the importance of a social pact that provides orientation through institutions. These entail norms, sanctions, organisational forms and a judicial order, jointly established, and, in a broader sense, the accepted rules of life with others. But they must be rules with a meaning, for which reasons can be given, and sustained by authorities that are required to answer for their own actions.

It should be noted how, as his thought matured, with respect to the fundamental value of freedom, the aims of Dahrendorfian reflection shift from the ways of positing its absolute character to the search for the conditions that make its concrete practice possible. There is a “correction of perspective” with respect to the early work Homo Sociologicus, “in which something of the understanding of the sense of institutions was still lacking” (2005b [1992]: 54).

Institutions thus take on importance because they “serve to preserve freedom”, provided, of course, that they are not “purely ‘legal’ but also ‘legitimate’” (2005b [1992]: 62). He has in mind reasonable laws and democratic governments that can be removed and replaced. He is aware that there may be a problem of excessive institutionalisation, of “hypernomy”, but the greater concern remains the absence of effective norms and authorities, since it becomes a threat to freedom. “Freedom is not an original state of man to which one can return by removing all constraints, nor a postmodern void in which everything is permitted. Freedom is a civil and civilising force. It therefore flourishes only if we manage to create and maintain institutions that give it stability and endurance”, so that “when the risks of anomie increase, the most important task for a liberal is that of building institutions” (2005 [1992]: 63). The importance Dahrendorf assigns to this decisive pillar of the open society is attested by the fact that, among the very few citations of his own works appearing in the address with which he accepted the Agnelli Prize, there is an explicit reference to the 1985 Hamlyn Lectures on Law and Order (1991 [1985]), which sum up the conclusions on the importance of normative and institutional aspects that he had reached starting from the experience of 1968.

Institutions will also have, as we shall see, an indispensable role in the discourse on citizenship, which takes on growing centrality in Dahrendorfian reflection from the 1970s onwards (1974; 1977a; 1989 [1988]; 1993); it is they, in fact, that guarantee our entitlements^[vii], our rights, and hence social justice, and they too that provide the basic structure for the provisions, the material and immaterial goods among which we choose, on which economic prosperity is founded and which give “substance” to the holding of rights. If one wishes to extend citizenship and to promote greater life opportunities for the greatest number of people, one must operate through institutions, never ceasing to improve and perfect them. An arduous task, above all when every aspect of the social order is crumbling, when the social contract itself is at stake, as happened with the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the so-called revolution of 1989.

It is from the events of 1989 that Dahrendorf draws the third lesson, the third prompt for reflection concerning the conditions of a free and just society. He reads with hope, but at the same time with concern, the changes under way in the countries that had just emerged from actually existing socialism, some so rapid as to leave a void attractive to adventurers and speculators, others so gradual as to allow the old nomenklatura to readapt. In such cases it is not a matter of perfecting institutions, but of establishing anew what Dahrendorf regards as the two basic institutions of freedom, namely democracy and the market economy, and it is exceedingly difficult to do so starting from rubble (1990). It is difficult above all because decades of state monopolism, of one-party rule and of the nomenklatura in power have atrophied civil society, which is the third fundamental pillar that freedom needs in order to be safeguarded. “The essential characteristic of the open society is that our lives unfold in ‘associations’ that lie beyond the reach of the State” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 64). The plurality and creative chaos of such associations, the articulation of citizens into countless parts, interests and classes, which is what happens when civil society is vital and fostered by liberal governments, protects against the possible monopolistic claims advanced by minorities and majorities and against the excessive intrusion of the State.

How fragile and complex to construct, but also how exposed to distortion and drift, this basic precondition of freedom can be emerges forcefully from the developments and the struggles of transition in the post-communist countries. The politicisation of figures from civil society, the fact that they should feel called to roles of government, leaving behind their principal passions and occupations, can be exhilarating, such as seeing the playwright Václav Havel as President of the Republic in Prague Castle, but for Dahrendorf it is in some sense a forcing of things, a proof that civil society is not yet consolidated. Still more worrying, in his view, are the various versions of fundamentalism, mostly religious or nationalist, which he sees spreading through various parts of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. In them he sees extreme forms of response to that need for belonging which is innate in human beings, a need to which democracy and the market economy cannot give adequate satisfaction. In case of difficulty, whether political or economic, such forms of bond, based on aggressive creeds, can degenerate and open the way to false gods and new dictators. “If there is any remedy at all to such threats to freedom, it is to be found in the sphere of civil society. The human need for belonging can be satisfied by a plurality of associations which, as such, have no political pretensions” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 66), but which offer some intense bonds and a multiplicity of weaker ones, variously combined. Of course, Dahrendorf warns, this depends in part on institutions, which can encourage the development of a lively civil society, and in part on the civic sense of individuals, which is far slower and more laborious to take shape.

The reflections on morality, institutions and civil society have one objective: the idea of citizenship in the “broadest and deepest sense of this word” (Havel 1991). In the concluding part of the address accepting the Agnelli Prize, the terminus ad quem of the “little journey through the moral education of a European intellectual” (2005b [1992]: 67) is made clear, the journey on which Dahrendorf, with autobiographical licence, meant to lead his listeners. It is precisely in citizenship, in fact, that he sees the three decisive elements of an open society summed up: it is an institution, a set of fundamental rights, of entitlements, that must be recognised and guaranteed to all citizens; it has to do with morality, both because citizens must be civil and civilised and because it embodies the striving towards a better society, one in which there are wider life chances for the greatest number of people; finally, it presupposes and enriches civil society, which is the environment in which it flourishes.

And that is not all: citizenship is also “the epitome of freedom”^[viii], in a sense that goes beyond classical liberalism and makes itself explicit as active liberty, as real opportunity. On the crucial question of freedom, Dahrendorf weaves a brief but fruitful dialogue with the two scholars who preceded him as winners of the Agnelli Prize: Isaiah Berlin and Amartya Sen. He restates Berlin’s well-known distinction (2000 [1958]) between “negative” and “positive” liberty but, as against the latter’s leaning towards freedom “from” undue constraints, he replies with the words of Sen (1997 [1990]), which connect the two kinds of freedom and show that both are jointly necessary. He then proposes a step forward in the debate on the subject: “the question is not whether freedom is negative or positive, but that it is an opportunity, a chance, a condition in which people are able to choose their own way, both in the sense that no one prevents them from doing so and in the sense that they are given the possibility of doing so. […] But those for whom choice remains a cynical promise with no real counterpart are not free” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 68-69)^[ix].

In these words lies the whole sense of the author’s intellectual challenge and of his practical and public commitment: how to reconcile freedom with cohesion and social justice, how to safeguard democratic institutions and the market economy while at the same time increasing human welfare across the whole planet. What emerges is the profile of a “radical liberal” who urges action and the assumption of responsibility, for whom the social rights of citizenship are a condition of progress just as important as the civil rights of freedom. It is not enough for a society to be capable of producing goods in abundance for widespread welfare actually to exist: it is the combination, always unstable and conflictual, between entitlements and provisions, between the claiming of rights and the availability of goods, that determines the welfare of a society and the life chances of each individual (Dahrendorf 1989 [1988]). When the emphasis is placed predominantly on economic growth, as recurrently happens in capitalist societies, new room must be given to citizenship, to those unconditional entitlements that transcend and contain the forces of the market. And a “world civil society” must be promoted: to conceive of it as bound to individual countries results in a privilege for those that are materially and culturally richer. Indeed, “so long as it is confined within the borders of nations, it is also accompanied by attitudes, policies and rules of exclusion that violate the underlying principles of civil society. The historical task of creating a civil society will be accomplished only when there are citizenship rights for all human beings. We need a world civil society” (Dahrendorf 1989 [1988]: 57).

Citizenship and civil society emerge from all this as moral objectives, objectives to fight for and for which one never finishes fighting: this is perhaps the most important Dahrendorfian legacy that we are called upon to take up.

Marta Picchio, PhD, is a researcher in General Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Social and Human Sciences and Education of the University of Perugia. Her research interests include the classics of Sociology, the Sociology of the stranger, of citizenship and of human rights (marta.picchio@unipg.it).

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Notes

^[i] The copy held at the Fondazione Agnelli is a specimen of the booklet, with unnumbered pages, that was distributed among the guests invited to the prize-giving ceremony, in the auditorium of the Turin Opera House, on 30 March 1992. Warm thanks are due to the Fondazione Agnelli, and in particular to Stefania Padulano of the Administration, for having made the original text available, scanned as a PDF.

^[ii] The text was first included, in English, in a collection of seminars, addresses and lectures edited by Dahrendorf towards the end of the 1990s (1997a); subsequently, by concession of the Fondazione Agnelli, it became part, with some editorial and textual modifications, plus an introduction by the author, of the body of writings ranging from 1990 to 2003 published by Laterza under the title, which does not correspond to the German original of the previous year, La società riaperta (Dahrendorf 2005a [2004]).

^[iii] The regard, and almost the “affection”, that Dahrendorf felt for this short text is attested also by the introductory words he devotes to it years later: “it is, in a certain way, if the expression does not sound excessive, an intellectual profession of faith” (Dahrendorf 2005b [1992]: 54).

^[iv] “Open societies are the societies that allow trial and error. This is the simplest definition of the concept […]. As is natural, the concept translates Popper’s theory of knowledge applied to social, economic and political situations. We cannot know, we can only conjecture. […] We cannot be sure how the good society ought to look; we can only put forward projects that move in that direction […] the possibility of debating their pros and cons is precisely what living in an open society ensures” (Dahrendorf 2005a [2004]: 197).

^[v] As Abbonizio (2021) points out, the young Dahrendorf, in the 1950s and 1960s, managed to crack the dominance of theories based one-sidedly on the principle of integration, bringing to light how conflict can be a decisive factor in social change.

^[vi] In the original version of the address, held at the Fondazione Agnelli, the passage is sharper: collaboration is defined with a superlative, as the “most cowardly” attitude of the twentieth century.

^[vii] The term entitlement is borrowed from Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (1981), and hence from a field of economic critique of the problems of poverty.

^[viii] Looking at citizenship in historical perspective, and confining the analysis to the principal Western countries, it appears to Dahrendorf, following Marshall (2002 [1950]), as a “path towards freedom”, a path “from subjects to citizens”, as he specifies by citing the title of a well-known volume by Giovanna Zincone (1992), a political sociologist whom he knew personally and who helped to spread his thought in Italy. For a moving remembrance of Lord Ralf by the Turin scholar, for many years the editor of «Biblioteca della Libertà», which published numerous writings by the author, see Zincone and Gastaldo (2009).

^[ix] The complex theme of freedom, how to understand it, how to analyse its changes, how to reconcile it with the other founding values of open societies, and how to connect it to liberalism as a political orientation, itself in transformation, runs through the whole Dahrendorfian intellectual itinerary: see, among others, Dahrendorf 1977b; 1979; 1984b; 1988; 1989; 2005c.