Claus Offe
In memoriam
On October 1, 2025, one of the co-founders of BIEN, Claus Offe died in Berlin, the city in which he was born on March 16,1940. He was one of Germany’s most distinguished sociologists, associated with the Frankfurt School of thought. He long identified himself as ‘Green Left’ – being a founding member of the German Greens – and as such saw basic income very much as a transformational policy. He was our friend and colleague for forty years and will be sorely missed.
Claus studied sociology and political science in Köln and at Berlin’s Freie Universität, was an assistant of Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt, where he obtained his doctorate in political science. Habermas remained influential in his research and publications, along with Albert Hirschman, whom he also greatly admired.
He subsequently worked at the Universities of Konstanz, Bielefeld and Bremen, before returning to Berlin after the fall of the wall in 1989, first at Humboldt University and then at the Hertie School of Government, of which he was a co-founder. Along the way, he had several periods in the United States, at Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and the New School in New York, as well as in the ANU in Australia.
November 1985, Claus Offe, then still at Bielefeld, was invited to participate in the “first international conference on basic income”, held in Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986. He replied straight away: “I find the whole idea of your conference very promising and attractive, and I gladly accept your invitation. As you may know, I am presently involved in the work of the group that tries to develop concrete legislative proposals on basic income for the green group within the Bundestag… Let me just say that you are really providing a public service in taking the initiative of this conference.”
The conference turned out to be the meeting at which BIEN was founded. Together with Peter Ashby, Claus Offe agreed to serve as BIEN’s first co-chair, a position he held until September 1988, when the duo was replaced by Edwin Morley-Fletcher and Guy Standing. Claus Offe remained an enthusiastic member of BIEN and regular participant in its congresses in the decades to follow. In particular, he rejoined the executive committee in 1998 as the efficient organizer of BIEN’s 2000 congress, hosted by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
During his long career, Claus played an active role in the international scientific community and in Germany’s and the EU’s public debate. His superbly argued Europe Entrapped (2015), for example, was an exceptionally lucid and influential contribution to the discussion of the European monetary union, the conclusion of which was captured in one sentence: “The euro was a big mistake, the undoing of which would be an even bigger mistake.”
Among his other influential books was Disorganized Capitalism, a set of essays published in English in 1985 probing the links between social power and political authority, in which he first advocated a basic income as a response to modern unemployment. For a while, he was drawn to Tony Atkinson’s idea of a Participation Income, but came to see the limitation of that variant of basic income.
In recent years, Claus’s lung cancer increasingly limited his mobility, but not the sharpness of his mind and the warmth of his friendship. He was an enthusiastic fisherman, loving to prowl on the banks in search of ‘the big one’. Above all, he was one of those formidable intellectual personalities who helped give the worldwide basic income movement its strength and influence.
Philippe Van Parijs and Guy Standing
