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His main areas of interest were the modern welfare state, labour markets, organisations, both social and political, and the relationship between institutions and individuals in democracies. He was a political sociologist, but in the most expansive sense, equally at home in institutional analysis, political philosophy, and when he needed it, rational choice theory. His forte was not the sort of throwaway diagnosis beloved of some of his more feted contemporaries, but the altogether more sober and comprehensive analytical essay. He didn’t mind words like ‘crisis’, or sharp, paradoxical formulations, but for him these were headline terms beneath which, with unmatched tenacity and a remarkable capacity to consider different positions, he would map out, the challenges and dilemmas facing politicians, policy makers and citizens alike across a range of areas and issues.

This ecumenical approach was already evident in his early work on Contradictions of the Welfare State, which was a response, and a corrective, both to Marxian critiques of welfare and its associated ‘class compromises’ and to a conservative cultural diagnosis, the ‘ungovernability’ thesis of the late 1960s and 1970s, according to which the modern welfare state was creating expectations among citizens that it could no longer meet and should also not want to meet if those citizens were to remain tough enough for life in modern liberal democracies. This theme of ‘democratic institutions and moral resources’, of what kind of people are needed to make democracies work, was set out most concisely in a 1992 paper with that title written with Ulrich Preuss, but it would remain with him throughout.

Disorganized Capitalism of 1985 was partly a response to Reaganism and Thatcherism and to the way Western societies were becoming differentiated and fractured along new lines, in ways that would make the relationship between class position, education, an individual’s sense of group belonging, and political affiliation harder to line up with one another. This was an opportunity, though, for political sociology, and Offe wrote some of his best work in this period, on the regulation of labour markets, the problem of group rights, arguments for a basic income, and democratic legitimacy.

When communism collapsed in 1989, Offe was at the forefront of the scramble by Western scholars to make sense of it but well equipped to avoid some of the easy answers offered by ‘transitologists’. Notable here was his essay on ‘the dilemma of simultaneity’: how to achieve three things – a new geopolitical status, a market economy and a democratic polity – which in older European states had not had to be achieved at the same time but had been stretched out, in some cases over centuries. It appeared in German in the provocatively titled Das Tunnel am Ende des Lichts (The Tunnel at the End of the Light) of 1994, which was meant less as scepticism than as a caution against over-expectation. The ideas in that essay were expanded in the book he co-authored with Preuss and Jon Elster, Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: rebuilding the ship at sea. The subtitle came from Otto Neurath in the 1920s, arguing against Descartes’ famous idea that the best way to rebuild things was to destroy them completely first. Neurath’s sentiment found its way into his later work on transitional justice after the collapse of authoritarian regimes, and justice between generations across the world.

In what seemed like a departure, in 2004, he published a study of the views taken of America by three European figures, de Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno, Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne, another paradoxical title which roughly translates as self-reflection from a distance (the English one is simply Reflections on America). Thereafter, he turned to Europe and, in Europe Entrapped of 2015, the problems of integration in a European Union that has some of the trappings of statehood but, often owing to the lack of political will from its leaders, not enough to command a sense of membership among its citizens that nation states have, for better or worse, managed to achieve.

In 2005, Claus came to Warwick to give the Social Theory Centre Annual lecture. In the evening, he lectured on Weber and Adorno; the next day, he took part in a panel discussion on the modern state and social policy with colleagues from the business school. To move so effortlessly, and without taking shortcuts, between different areas and different idioms is impressive, but in a way, he had been doing so all his professional life.

Charles Turner

Department of Sociology

University of Warwick