Background
Ludwig Gumplowicz was born on March 9, 1838 in Krakow, Poland.
Ludwig Gumplowicz was born on March 9, 1838 in Krakow, Poland.
Ludwig Gumplowicz studied law in Kraków, then became a lawyer and publicist there.
In 1875, Ludwig Gumplowicz 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.
Ludwig Gumplowicz became interested in the problem of suppressed ethnic groups very early. He was a lifelong advocate of minorities in the Habsburg Empire, in particular the Slavic speakers. He 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.
Ludwig Gumplowicz saw the state as an institution which served various controlling elites at different times. In analysis, he leaned towards macrosociology, predicting that if the minorities of a state became socially integrated, they would break out in war.
During his life he was considered a Social Darwinist, mainly because of his approach to society as an aggregate of groups struggling ruthlessly among themselves for domination. Nevertheless, he did not deduce his conceptions directly from evolutionary theory and criticised those sociologists (Comte, Spencer, Lilienfeld) who employed biological analogies as an explanatory principle. At the same time he shared the naturalistic conception of history and considered humanity a particle of the universe and nature, a particle governed by the same eternal laws as the whole.
Ludwig Gumplowicz was married and had 2 sons.