Word: dahrendorf
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...discipline is still next to godliness in the eyes of many Germans. According to one well-known barb, Germans obey the law because it's against the law not to do so. Yet there are signs that even in Germany, discipline is giving way to what Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who also happens to be the Free Democrats' leading thinker, calls "the individual search for happiness by people freed of the fetters of tradition and thrown into the affluent society." Writes Dahrendorf in Society and Democracy in Germany...
...with paychecks than with princely comings and goings. But the country's economic and social transformation has failed notably to produce a unified, national Fuhrungsschicht (leadership layer) in place of the old aristocratic ruling caste. The result is a confused and confusing society in which, says Sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, there is not one class of Prominenz but "a multitude of competing groups." The "pyramids of power" include the church, the military, local government and such venerable universities as Tubingen, Gottingen and Heidelberg, where a Herr Professor commands undiminished respect from the community at large...
...empire; Hans Giinther Sohl, who as boss of Thyssen since war's end has turned a family ironworks into West Germany's biggest steelmaker; and Munich's Rudolf Miinemann, one of the nation's biggest and boldest financiers. Yet, for all its wealth, says Sociologist Dahrendorf, the Geldaristokratie "is searching above itself in the social hierarchy for its behavioral standards. But the space above it is empty." This, he suggests, accounts for the joyless, frantic materialism that characterizes much of postwar German life-"the medieval choir stall in the dining room, the conspicuous consumption, the complete...
Riesman qualifies his statements almost continuously, and a little defensively. He seeks to hold a middle ground, neither condemning the other-directed nor exalting the inner-directed. Yet there is something a little disturbing in his generous tolerance, and in the utopia of autonomy. As Dahrendorf observes, the autonomous seems very like the inner-directed, and Riesman is disturbingly kind to the other-directed. The categories are ideal types, and they don't work well on real people--this much Riesman admits: they are, in fact, polarities of behavior. But much of this collection of critiques is devoted to showing...
...answers, almost elliptically, by recalling a theoretical link between fear of the unconscious and longing for membership, and then suggesting that a nation whose illusions are constantly shattered, and whose self-awareness is coming inexorably to dominate its thought, could scarcely avoid this fear. It is disturbing that Dahrendorf has commented, "I do not wish to be misunderstood...whatever criticism I may suggest of American society is praise by comparison to my views about my own country, Germany...