Claus Offe | |
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.jpg) Offe in 2019 | |
| Born | (1940-03-16)16 March 1940 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | 1 October 2025(2025-10-01) (aged 85) |
| Spouse | Ulrike Poppe |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Academic advisor | Jürgen Habermas |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | |
| Part ofa series on the |
| Frankfurt School |
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Major works |
Claus Offe (16 March 1940 – 1 October 2025) was a Germanpolitical sociologist associated with theFrankfurt School who taught at universities in Germany and the United States, with a focus on political economic analysis. He found new perspectives for a wide range of topics such as analysis of social crises, the welfare state, the transformation of Eastern Europe and European integration,unconditional basic income, civil society and the common good. Offe was a founding member of theGreens and of theHertie School.
Offe was born in Berlin on 16 March 1940,[1][2] the eldest of the four children of the chemistHans Albert Offe [de] and his wife Ursula née Brenneke. After World War II, the family moved several times, often withinNorth Rhine-Westphalia.[1] He achieved hisAbitur from the humanist Wilhelm Dörpfeld Gymnasium inWuppertal-Elberfeld in 1959.[1] He first studiedmusicology and sociology at theUniversity of Cologne from 1959 to 1960.[1][2] He then moved to theHumboldt-University of Berlin to study sociology, economics and philosophy, completing with a diploma in sociology in 1965. During his studies, he was a member of theSozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS); he was a co-author of its 1965 publicationHochschule in der Demokratie (Academy in Democracy).[1][3]
Offe worked as an assistant toJürgen Habermas at theUniversity of Frankfurt,[2] teaching sociology of organisations and political sociology until 1969.[1] He focused on theory of politics and political economic analysis.[4] He achieved hisPhD in 1968, with a dissertation entitledLeistungsprinzip und industrielle Arbeit (Performance Principle and Industrial Work).[1]
He worked as fellow and visiting professor at the Institutes for Advanced Study inStanford,Princeton and theAustralian National University.[2] He studied between 1969 and 1971 at theUniversity of California at Berkeley on a Harkness fellowship, atHarvard University as a research associate at the Center for West European Studies,[1] and atThe New School in Greenwich, New York.[2] In a 1972 book,Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, he analysed the structural problems caused by the internal contradictions of the capitalist state, keeping an intellectual independence from Marxist dogmas.[4] He collaborated with Habermas andCarl Friedrich von Weizsäcker at theMax Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg.[4] He completed hishabilitation in political sociology at theUniversity of Konstanz in 1973.[1][2]
In Germany, he held chairs for political science and political sociology at theBielefeld University from 1975 to 1989, working withNiklas Luhmann, with whom he shared the view that the state was not a mirror of the economy, but had its own interests, describing statehood in the tradition ofMax Weber.[4] Offe taught at theUniversity of Bremen from 1989 to 1995, where he helped to establish the Centre for Social Policy, with a focus on the future of the working society and thenew social movements,[4] in the context of ecological crises.[3] After German reunification he taught at theHumboldt University of Berlin from 1995 to 2005,[1][5] where he was part of the founding generation of renewed social science, interested in the changes in Europe and its integration.[4] Offe taught from 2005 to 2010 political sociology at theHertie School of Governance, a private university in Berlin that he co-founded.[5]
He made substantial contributions to understanding the relationships betweendemocracy andcapitalism. His work focused oneconomies andstates in transition to democracy. He was able to find new approaches and perspectives on a wide range of topics such as analysis of social crises, welfare state, the transformation of Eastern Europe, European integration,unconditional basic income, civil society and the common good.[4] A left-leaning German academic, he is counted among the second generation of theFrankfurt School.[6]
Offe was founding member of theGreens.[7] In politics, he advisedSocial Democrats to collaborate with the Greens already in the late 1970s.[6]
Offe was one of the founding members of the Basic Income European Network, a network that later renamed toBasic Income Earth Network, and he wrote several articles and books around the idea from the 1980s.[8]
To the article "A Basic Income for All" byPhilippe Van Parijs inBoston Review, Offe published a response. Offe clarified some of his thoughts about the universal basic income and how to get there. He started by saying that he agreed with Van Parijs that basic income clearly was a "morally attractive arrangement" and also thought that Van Parijs provided a "normatively compelling argument for it in terms of real freedom and social justice". He moved on to the question of why so many people, both elites and non-elites, seemed reluctant or even against the idea of an unconditional basic income. He argued that one way of looking at this was to acknowledge that certain groups may well have legitimate or rational reasons to fear the introduction of unconditional basic income. Employers may, for example, fear that their control over the workers may be weakened. Individuals and organizations may also fear that the "moral underpinnings of a social order" will be substantially weakened, that is the idea that everyone should work, employed orself-employed, in order to have alegitimate right to a living income. There was also the fear, he noted, that the tax will be too high.[9]
Taking these fears into account, Offe suggested that the basic income implementation should be "governed by principles of gradualism and reversibility". Instead of thinking about basic income implementation as "before" and "after" he thought it was better to promote the system change in the dynamic terms of less and more. One way of gradually moving towards a universal basic income, according to Offe, could be to expand the list of groups, conditions and activities that were recognized as legitimate for something like a basic income already, asTony Atkinson had proposed earlier in the name of aparticipation income.[9]
Offe marriedUlrike Poppe in 2001.[1] He died on 1 October 2025, at the age of 85.[5][6][4][3]
