[1] He served as director of the London School of Economics and Warden of St Antony's College, University of Oxford.

[3] When Ralf was only a teenager, he and his father, an SPD member of the German Parliament, were arrested and sent to concentration camps for their anti-Nazi activities during the Nazi regime.

In 1944, during the last year of the Second World War, he was arrested again for engaging in anti-Nazi activities and sent to a concentration camp in Poland.

Nicola Dahrendorf has worked for the United Nations and as the West Africa Regional Conflict Adviser to the UK Government.

The interest groups identity and sense of belonging are produced when people have the ability to communicate, recruit members, form leadership, and create a unifying ideology[12] In 1960, he became a visiting professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York.

[13] From 1967 to 1970, he was Chairman of the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie), resigning it when he took up his office at Brussels.

From 1987 to 1997, he was Warden of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford, succeeding the historian Sir Raymond Carr.

On 15 July 1993, he was created a life peer with the title Baron Dahrendorf of Clare Market in the City of Westminster.

Dahrendorf insisted that even the most basic civil rights, including equality and freedom of expression, be given constitutional legitimacy.

[5] He favoured laws and policies that encouraged personal freedom, a sense of citizenship, and a broadening of social, economic and political opportunities.

He argued that Germany's problems stemmed from a belief in absolute answers and in the yearning for an all-powerful leader to put them into effect.

Despite later revisions and affirmations of his work, the book still remains his first detailed and most influential account of the problem of social inequality in modern, or post-capitalist societies.

[19] In analysing and evaluating the arguments of structural functionalism and Marxism, Dahrendorf believed that neither theory alone could account for all of society.

Drawing on aspects of both Marxism and structural functionalists to form his own beliefs, Dahrendorf highlighted the changes that have occurred in modern society.

While he believes that both are social perspectives, the Utopian approach is most apparent in modern-day society, leaving Dahrendorf to create a balance between the two views.

[21] Dahrendorf discusses literary utopias to show that the structural-functionalists idea of the social system is utopians in itself because it possess all the necessary characteristics.

Dahrendorf agrees with Marx that authority, in the 19th century, was based on income, and thus the rich bourgeoisie ruled the state.

In order to understand structural functionalism, we study three bodies of work: Davis and Moore, Parsons, and Merton.

[26][27] Dahrendorf states that capitalism has undergone major changes since Marx initially developed his theory on class conflict.

Instead, Dahrendorf's thesis was "the differential distribution of authority invariably becomes the determining factor of systematic social conflicts".

[28] Due to the rise of the joint stock company, ownership does not necessarily reflect control of economic production in modern society.

[34] In increasingly modern, multicultural societies, the contested concept and construct of identity received growing emphasis and was the focus of many debates.

As a consequence of the debates over identity, and inevitably in a globalising, modern, multicultural world, the issues of citizenship came into play.

Dahrendorf criticised and wanted to challenge the "false, utopian representation of societal harmony, stability, and consensus by the structural functionalist school.

"[37] Nevertheless, Dahrendorf still shares key ideas with structural functionalists, such as a general faith in the efficacy of political and economic institutions.

Like Weber, Dahrendorf criticises Marx's view that the working class will ultimately become a homogeneous group of unskilled machine operators.

Dahrendorf points out that in postcapitalist society there are elaborate distinctions regarding income, prestige, skill level, and life chances.

Dahrendorf's pluralist view of class and power structures and belief that hierarchies of authority are inevitable in modern societies also reflect Weberian ideas.

There is a jury made up of high-class scientists and media personalities that help decide who should receive funding for their projects.

Children Born Of War – Past, Present, Future, saw researchers from eleven research institutions in the European Union study the life courses of children, fathered by foreign soldiers and born to local mothers, who were conceived during and after armed conflicts – a topic about which families, local communities and entire societies, often remain silent.