Delivered as the 1974 BBC Reith Lectures, it discusses freedom and it's meaning after industrial society has expanded people’s rights while surrounding them with increasingly powerful states, corporations, unions and bureaucracies.

His central concern is what he calls “life chances”: the real opportunities people possess to act, participate and shape their own lives, rather than freedoms that exist only on paper. Writing amid economic crisis, student revolt and anxiety about institutional power, Dahrendorf argues that liberty requires an uneasy balance between economic survival, social justice and the individual’s ability to resist organisations that begin serving themselves rather than their members.

The lectures are firmly liberal, but not complacently so: conflict is treated as a permanent feature of free societies and something democracy must accommodate rather than suppress. A compact piece of postwar political thought for readers interested in freedom, class, bureaucracy and the question of whether large institutions liberate people or merely administer them more efficiently.

First edition. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975 paperback. Very good condition with light cover rubbing and minor edge and corner wear.