The sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, a pioneering thinker of liberalism, built his work on one idea about conflict. He did not see it as a disturbance of social order. He saw it as eine hervorragende schöpferische Kraft, an outstanding creative force, of social change. He wrote about it from his 1957 book on class conflict in industrial society to Der moderne soziale Konflikt (The Modern Social Conflict, 1992).