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Liberalism is under pressure in the United States and Britain as a “creeping authoritarianism” threatens the values that have inspired and brought millions of people to these two countries, according to Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, the renowned sociologist, philosopher and politician.
Speaking at a lecture in honor of the 80th birthday of Fritz Stern, the eminent historian of German and Jewish history who taught at Columbia for more than 40 years, Dahrendorf focused his talk on the perception that cherished ideals of the Enlightenment are now being eroded, and on the impact this development has on people like himself and Stern, both of whom fled Nazi Germany to countries they thought embodied liberal values. (Reflecting on his own life, he said that unlike Stern, he’d returned to Germany before ultimately settling in Britain and taking British citizenship.) Click to view the video of Dahrendorf’s presentation.
Introducing Dahrendorf, Christof Mauch, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., said he is able to make Enlightenment ideas accessible to many people. “Few have greater vision and clarity,” Mauch told the Columbia audience. In remarks about Fritz Stern, Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger affectionately observed that he is a man whom “you want to embrace and take with you.”
In Dahrendorf’s view, humans are not liberal by nature. “They miss liberty when it is absent, but take it for granted when it is under threat,” he said. “This makes for such a widely tolerated condition that one is tempted to call it normal.” Therefore, he continued, it is important for an active minority in the early 21st century -- led by thinkers like Stern -- to “keep the flame of liberalism alive against all odds.”
Although the measures that have been taken by the Bush administration beginning with the USA Patriot Act are by now familiar to everyone, the same process has also been taking place in Britain, Dahrendorf reported. The U.K. government recently announced plans for a compulsory identity card scheme and has also proposed to extend the period that terrorism suspects can be detained without charge.
All told, however, Dahrendorf is more worried about the effects of these trends on American people than on his fellow British citizens. He interpreted the lack of American public protest against the government’s anti-terrorism measures as an indication that “the civic apathy so typical of America is spreading everywhere.” Many Americans are accepting restrictions on their liberties in exchange for the security of a quiet life, he observed.
Yet Dahrendorf said he remains optimistic about America’s future. History teaches that whenever liberalism is under pressure, the nation “has a capacity for change without violence.” And with liberty so well entrenched in America’s history, he added, “the reversal of the trends that put liberty under pressure may be just around the corner in this country -- and in others as well.”
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