Ludwig Gumplowicz

Ludwig Gumplowicz (9 March 1838 – 19 August 1909) was a Polish sociologist, jurist, historian, and political scientist, who taught constitutional and administrative law at the University of Graz.

Gumplowicz was the son of a Jewish carpet and porcelain manufacturer, Abraham Gumplowicz. Gumplowicz is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology across German-speaking countries. While living under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, he witnessed many violent anti-Semitic conflicts between ethnic groups, which influenced his sociological theories of social conflict and explaining social phenomenas later on in life. His contributions to the fields of social science, political science, and jurisprudence allowed these fields to expand under the lens of Gumplowicz's applications of sociological generalizations. In all three areas, he was a straightforward and vivacious writer who excelled in controversy. He was well known for his skepticism of the permanence of social progress and his belief that the state emerges from inevitable confrontation rather than unity or divine inspiration.

As a child of a Polish family of Jewish origin, Gumplowicz grew up in a family that was part of a progressive Jewish group that advocated for a comprehensive social assimilation program for all Jews. Before the outbreak of the January Insurrection of 1863, the Gumplowicz family's home was one of the outposts of conspiracy. During the Insurrection, it had become a lodging place for vulnerable youth and a refuge for the wounded. Ludwik's father, Abraham, assisted in the insurgency's planning, and his two older brothers fought alongside him. Ludwig Gumplowicz and his wife both converted to Calvinism to escape prevailing antisemitism.

Judaism was always present for Gumplowicz and his family while growing up. Therefore, the well-being of the Jewish people was essential to him. Even though his father, Abraham Gumplowicz, tried to assimilate into the community of Krakow, Jews were often seen as second-class citizens. This brought Gumplowicz many obstacles that he had to face as a Jew. He wrote several articles in which he attempted to bring attention to the issues of antisemitism and the emancipation of the Jews.

He then went on to study at the universities of Kraków and Vienna and became a professor of public law at the University of Graz in 1875. He and his wife, Franciska, had two sons. In 1875, Gumplowicz began studying law at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He then went to study in Vienna for a year returning to Kraków to receive a doctoral law degree. He culminated in the foundation of the first Sociological Society in Graz. In 1860, he began his journalistic career. From 1869 to 1874 he edited his own magazine the Kraj (the Country). Then in 1875, at the age of thirty-seven, he entered the University of Graz as a lecturer in the science of administration and Austrian administrative law. In 1882, he became an associate professor, and in 1893 a full professor. Gumplowicz then retired from academia in 1908.

As a Polish intellectual, he felt a sense of imminent doom in his homeland, the strangeness of a foreign world, and then nostalgia for their homeland, and gradually became appreciated in his adopted country, though largely going unnoticed by his own compatriots. By rejecting orthodox jurisprudence in favor of establishing sociology that had yet to be widely accepted in Austria and Germany, he remained an outsider and at odds with university circles after years of studying and teaching his beliefs. He would frequently stress his Polish and Jewish roots, further isolating him from university circles.

Ludwig Gumplowicz's first sociological work was Race and State (1875) which was later changed to The Sociological Idea of the State, (1881) then changed to General State Law ("Allgemeines Staatsrecht") (1907). His other works include the Outlines of Sociology, Austrian State Law, The Race Struggle, Sociological Essays, Sociology and Politics, and others, and have been translated into other foreign languages. Gumplowicz left a huge literary legacy, with 190 works to his name, not to mention the scores of papers and reviews he wrote in Polish.

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.^{[citation needed]} He was a lifelong advocate of minorities in the Habsburg Empire, in particular, the Slavic speakers.