The Institute for Human Sciences mourns the passing of Claus Offe (1940–2025), who died in his native Berlin on 1 October. Offe, a former member of the Institutes’ Academic Advisory Board and a non-resident permanent fellow at the IWM since 2015, was an extraordinary scholar and a benevolent colleague. His intellectual erudition, clairvoyance, and accuracy were striking, but success did not make him arrogant or ignorant. To the contrary, throughout his life, Offe was a most generous supporter of his students and colleagues with a curiosity for their thoughts and a respectful view on competing ideas.
Claus Offe served as professor of political sociology at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin until 2015. He began his academic career in the intellectual environment of the Frankfurt School as an assistant to Jürgen Habermas, with whom he maintained a productive exchange. Offe completed his PhD at the University of Frankfurt and his habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he held chairs in political science and political sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld (1975-1989) and Bremen (1989-1995), as well as at the Humboldt University of Berlin (1995-2005). At Humboldt, he became one of the outstanding personalities of a new founding generation that reshaped the social sciences.
Offe was invited to the most prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Australian National University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and The New School in New York. He is among the most prominent theorists in modern social science and one of the most cited authors in political sociology, and his work will continue to influence our understanding of contemporary societies.
After 1989, Offe developed a strong interest in the system changes in Central and Eastern Europe, which brought him into closer contact with the IWM. In 1992, the IWM initiated a comparative long-term program on the Social Costs of Economic Transformation in Central Europe (SOCO) to address the vital social issues of post-communist transformation in the former East Bloc. As a member of the SOCO Expert Committee, Offe gave the program decisive impetus. He also played a central role in the long-term research focus on Solidarity that Krzysztof Michalski, the founding rector, established at the IWM in 2004. From 1992, Offe was a faculty member of the IWM Summer Schools held annually in Cortona.
He was a regular contributor to the Institute’s conferences and its journal Transit. Also, he was one of the very few who held both of the IWM’s most prestigious lectures. In 2006, he delivered the IWM Lectures in Human Sciences on „Soziale Macht: Formen, Kontrolle und Nutzen“. In 2010, he gave the annual Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture „On Responsibility“.
His last visit as a fellow at the Institute was in autumn 2021. For more than three decades, Claus Offe was a reliable friend, an advisor, and an inexhaustible source of ideas.
The IWM will honor his legacy.
