Ralf Dahrendorf

[y66]

I read this morning that Ralf Dahrendorf died last week. NYT obituary here.

 

Excerpt:

Democracy and its problems preoccupied Mr. Dahrendorf for his entire career as a scholar and as a politician in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. As a high school student he had been imprisoned by the Nazis for spreading leaflets opposing the regime, and early in his life he developed a deep suspicion of what he called “closed, encompassing systems.”

 

Mr. Dahrendorf championed liberal pluralism, which he defined as a social system that recognizes divergent interests and aspirations and puts institutions in place that allow them to be expressed.

 

Democracy is “about organizing conflict and living with conflict,” he told an audience at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.

 

“The world isn’t simple, nor should it be simple,” he continued. “It’s rich because it’s complicated. Let’s learn to live with this.”

Amen brother D.