Il principio di coercizione nel pensiero politico di Ralf Dahrendorf

In the history of social and political thought, Dahrendorf has shown two different traditions on the conception of power, directly related with Socrates or Plato ideas of justice: consensus versus constraint. Here, two incompatible views of society were stated, and this kind of conflict, after Hobbes and Rousseau, come to the present day. In Dahrendorf's work the problem of order is associated to the Hobbes point of view: the structure of the social process has survival as its object. The original human condition of homo homini lupus can be overcome only with the existence of a political instance: the power to make rules. In fact, norms are the instrument of regulation of a human attitude oriented only on himself, his well-being, his usefulness. But the act of disciplining also requires the contribution of individual rationality. In this sense, modernity, with the affirmation of a rational-legal authority, if on the one hand it has determined the extension of life chances, on the other it has had repercussions on the normative construction of society. The role of the social contract, of cultural constraints, of anomie constitute the decisive points of Dahrendorf's reflection on the modernity transformations.