The Role of Kant’s Anthropology in Ralf Dahrendorf’s Theory of Conflicts: “Unsocial Sociability” in Human Nature, Culture and Politics

Abstract

My paper focuses on one of the most discussed key concepts of Kant’s social philosophy, namely on his notion of “unsocial sociability”, from the perspective of its influence on Ralph Dahrendorf’s theory of social conflicts. In the first part, I show how various areas of Kant’s philosophy – his ethics, philosophy of history, anthropology, social and political philosophy – are connected through this concept, and briefly describe the key features of its critical reception. In the second half of the article, I turn to the question concerning the role of this concept in Dahrendorf’s theory. I show that this concept was already implicitly present in his early studies of the 1950s and was gradually becoming a more explicit part of his approach to the analysis of conflicts, playing its most prominent role in his works of the 1980s and 2000s. In contrast to those critics of Dahrendorf who regard the notion of unsocial sociability as methodologically alien to his social theory, I argue that Kant’s concept is used as its theoretically substantiated component rather than an anthropological vignette that only pays tribute to Kant as a social thinker. Moreover, it still significantly influences more recent approaches, primarily because it allows scholars to see conflicts in a normative light and to critically assess utopian elements of previous interpretations.