CHAPTER Ix 
THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGISTS 
Lupwic GuMPLowicz (1838-1910) 
Progress by Inter-Group Conflict 
Gumeptowicz 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.! 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,? 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? He 
is a strict determinist and finds the goal of life-philosophy in 
resignation to the inevitable. 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.® 
All cosmic phenomena are classified into physical, mental 
and social,® all controlled by the operation of the following 
1 Grundriss der Sociologie (1885), pp. 4£. (Moore’s Translation, pp. 24 f.). 
2 Tbid., p. 14 (Moore, p. 32). 
3 Ibid., pp. 62 f. (Moore, pp. 74 f.). 
4 Tbid., pp. 4, 228. 
5 Tbid., pp. 11 f. 
8 Tbid., pp. 55 f. 
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