The Open Society and Its Fears

Abstract

On re-reading the Transactions of the agitated Sixteenth German Sociological Congress in April 1968 here in Frankfurt, I was struck by the episode at the end of the debate on the paper entitled ‘Power, Class Relations, and Stratification’. One of the authors of the collective product (which made me visibly angry at the time) ended his final contribution to the debate with the declaration: ‘In the name of the collaborators of our paper I hereby inform the participants of the Sixteenth German Sociological Congress that we shall pass on the honorarium for the jointly presented paper to the collection arranged by the Socialist Student Society in favour of deserters from the American army. We invite Mr Dahrendorf as well as the other recipients of honoraria to do the same.’ The applause was tremendous. That was predictable at the time, but how times have changed! No one has offered me an honorarium for today’s lecture. Perhaps I should, on the contrary, have paid for the favour, like the authors of the Transactions of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States whose first footnote always says ‘This is an advertisement’, because they have paid a subsidy for the publication.

Keynote Address to the 25th German Sociological Congress in Frankfurt/Main, 12 October 1990