BERLIN — German-British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, a leading scholar of class divisions in modern society, has died. He was 80.

The Social Science Research Center in Berlin, where Dahrendorf was a research professor, said he died Wednesday evening in a university clinic in Cologne.

Born in Hamburg in 1929, Dahrendorf taught at numerous schools and universities in Britain and Germany. He took British nationality in 1988 and was knighted in 1993.

He was elected to the German parliament 1969 for the pro-business Free Democrats, and served as a Foreign Ministry secretary in the first government of Chancellor Willy Brandt.

A political scientist and economist as well as a sociologist, much of Dahrendorf's work examined class and integration in modern society. His many books included his best-known work "Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society," which he wrote in 1959.

In 2007 he was awarded Spain's Prince of Asturias social science prize, in recognition of what organizers called his role as "the leading representative of contemporary European liberal thought."