Liberal Complacence

“A very perfect gentile knight” —Sir Ralf Dahrendorf was born in the Weimar Republic, the son of a Social Democratic deputy in the Reichstag who suffered imprisonment under Hitler; he himself studied and taught at several Western campuses, entered West German political life, and graduated to being a European commissioner in the early 1970s, thence moving to Britain, where he was appointed director of the London School of Economics, ending up as warden of St. Anthony’s Coll...