Ludwig Gumplowicz

Ludwig Gumplowicz (March 9, 1838, Kraków – August 20, 1909, Graz, Austria-Hungary), was one of the founders of European sociology. He was also a jurist and political scientist who taught constitutional and administrative law at the University of Graz.

Gumplowicz studied law in Kraków, then became a lawyer and publicist there. In 1875, he began teaching administration in Graz; in 1882 he became an associate professor, and in 1893 a full professor. In 1909, after he had become ill with cancer, he and his wife committed suicide by taking poison.

Gumplowicz became interested in the problem of suppressed ethnic groups very early, being from a Jewish family and coming from Kraków, a city of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth which was first partitioned and later as the Free City of Kraków annexed by Austria-Hungary. He was a lifelong advocate of minorities in the Habsburg Empire, in particular the Slavic speakers.

Gumplowicz soon became interested in the later form of sociology of conflict, starting out from the idea of the group (then known as race). He understood race as a social and cultural, rather than a biological phenomenon. He stressed in every way the immeasurably small role of biological heredity and the decisive role of the social environment in the determination of human behaviour. While attaching a positive significance to the mixing of races, he noted that pure races had already ceased to exist.

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