Ralf Dahrendorf

conflict and the dimension of authority

pp. 78-105

in: David Binns, Beyond the sociology of conflict, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977

Abstract

Inseparable from Weber's sociology is the fatalistic assumption of the necessity of domination. At the same time, his analysis of the class structure of capitalist society is articulated specifically in terms of and at a particular level of economic action. Ralf Dahrendorf, by contrast, has abstracted the concept of authority from the totality of Weber's work and elaborated a comprehensive theory of class structuration wholly in terms of it. It will be our contention that Dahrendorf's social theory, while having superficially responded to the massive social changes in the capitalist world during the last two decades, as a corpus of work is flawed by its metaphysical assumptions concerning the primacy of authority relations in the dynamics of conflict group formation.