CHAPTER DC 



THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGISTS 

 LUDWIG GUMPLOWICZ (1838-1910) 



Progress by Inter-Group Conflict 



GUMPLOWICZ takes as his point of departure Comte's positiv- 

 ism and Spencer's theory of deterministic evolution but criticizes 

 the former for giving any place whatever to policies of social 

 amelioration, claiming that all such are absurd in a deterministic 

 system, and criticizes the latter for taking the individual as his 

 unit instead of the primitive horde, also for his failure to distin- 

 guish the different realms in the cosmic process governed by 

 entirely different kinds of laws. 1 In this he seems strangely 

 inconsistent for while criticizing monism and its attempt to find 

 a universal law for events in the whole domain of nature, 

 holding that all such attempts fail to distinguish between univer- 

 sal and social laws, 2 yet a little further on in his discussion he 

 says, "Modern natural science has successfully demonstrated that 

 even ' human mind ' is subject to physical laws; that the phe- 

 nomena of the individual mind are emanations from matter," 

 and then proceeds to lay down ten laws that are universal. 3 He 

 is a strict determinist and finds the goal of lif e-philosophy in 

 resignation to the inevitable. 4 This position together with his 

 assumption of the multiple origin of humanity might warrant his 

 being called a pluralistic-positivist. 



Gumplowicz criticizes the organicists with special vigor but 

 gives Spencer credit for a discriminating use of the concept. 6 



All cosmic phenomena are classified into physical, mental 

 and social, 6 all controlled by the operation of the following 



1 Grundriss der Sociologie (1885), pp. 4 f. (Moore's Translation, pp. 24 f.). 

 3 Ibid., p. 14 (Moore, p. 32). 



3 Ibid., pp. 62 f. (Moore, pp. 74 f.). 



4 Ibid., pp. 4, 228. 

 6 Ibid., pp. it f. 



8 Ibid., pp. 55 f. 



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