Ralf Dahrendorf obituary

Yesterday the Financial Times ran an obituary from Liberal Democrat peer William Wallace:

Ralf Dahrendorf, who has died at the age of 80, crowded several careers, in Germany and Britain, into a single life.

First a leading academic sociologist, then a rising Liberal German politician, director of the London School of Economics and later warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, he combined political engagement and intellectual debate. He was successively a German minister, a European commissioner and a British peer. He was a European public intellectual; the author of nearly 30 books, and a long-standing columnist for Die Zeit and La Repubblica as well as for English and French media. Yet he was never entirely comfortable in any of those posts, except at the LSE; he was instinctively a liberal dissenter who enjoyed questioning the ruling consensus, whatever it might be.

You can read the full piece here.