Ludwig Gumplowicz - Outlines of Sociology

LUDWIG GUMPLOWICZ

EDITED WITH A PREFACE,
INTRODUCTION AND
NOTES
BY
IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ

First published 1980 by Transaction Publishers

First German language edition, 1885

First English language edition, 1899

Second German language edition, 1905

Second English language edition, 1963

Published 2019 by Routledge

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New material this edition, copyright 1980 by Taylor & Francis.

Copyright 1963 by Paine-Whitman Publishers

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 78-62687

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 1838-1909.

Outlines of sociology.

(Social science classics series)

Translation of Grundriss der Sociologie.

Reprint of the 1963 ed. published by Paine-Whitman, New York, in series: Paine-Whitman studies in social theory.

Bibliography

Includes index.

1. Sociology. I. Title. II. Series.

[HM57.G913 1978]30178-62687

ISBN 0-87855-693-1

ISBN 13: 978-0-87855-693-9 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-87855-309-9 (hbk)

MORE IN SORROW THAN IN JEST, I wrote in my Foreword to Aleksander Gellas Ward-Gumplowicz Correspondence that what we need now is a society for the restoration of conflict theory in the light of the teachings of Ludwig Gumplowicz; an imaginary association akin to Lenins urgings for an equally imaginary Society of Left Wing Friends for Hegel. One would have to say frankly that Hegel has fared better than Gumplowicz in this private recruitment process. Lenin could, after all, muster a party apparatus for his favorite dialectician. Indeed, the Left Hegelians have often been most damaging in their assessment of Gumplowicz.

We are fortunate to have Aleksander Gella as an exile in America. Gellas work on Gumplowicz is solid, informed by a knowledge of the Polish antecedents to his work. So much previous attention has been paid to Gumplowicz as a German language writer that we have forgotten the Polish and Jewish roots of his earlier writings; these patriotic concerns provided intellectual substance, albeit not always consistent outcomes, to Gumplowicz later and more famous works. Gella has properly emphasized this earlier period. His edition of the correspondence of Gumplowicz with Ward, not to mention the scholarly exchanges we had in the pages of The American Journal of Sociology, represents a meaningful input into discussions of Gumplowicz status in the history of sociology.

There has been considerable interest in Gumplowicz since 1963, but somehow little has been translated into work done. What remarks have been issued can hardly be termed complimentary; they might more readily be described as derogatory.

The most important work in this genre, because of his considerable continental influence, is Georg Lukacs Die Zerstrung der Vernunft. Gumplowicz gets sandwiched in between the racist theory of Gobineau and the work of H. S. Chamberlain, called the father of modern racism. And as if the neighbors surrounding Gumplowicz are insufficient to draw the correct thought, he is given Ratzenhofer and Woltmann as sociological companions in the same chapter of this sad work. While Lukacs is not entirely oblivious to the antiracist character of Gumplowicz writings, he nevertheless insists that since racists were neo-Darwinists, and Gumplowicz is also a neo-Darwinist, the latter is clearly a latent (if not manifest) racist. The proof of this syllogism apparently is in Gumplowicz admission that biology has something to do with sociology.

More serious, Lukacs invokes Ratzenhofers phrase that the idea of revolution is antiscientific to somehow demonstrate that Gumplowicz engaged in mystification of thought. It is true that Gumplowicz inverted the relationship between State and Economy as it exists in Marx; but instead of appreciating the prophetic nature of Gumplowicz contribution, instead of understanding the extent to which this picks up the threads in Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, the erstwhile champion of latter-day orthodox Marxism, in what must certainly rank as his worst literary effort, judges Gumplowicz to be part of that long line of scholars in the trajectory of irrational theory from Schelling to Hitler. Thus this entirely cosmopolitan Jew, Polish national patriot fighter, against ethnic and racial annihilation, and one of the great founders of The Conflict School of Sociology, a sociology stripped of its theological pretensions, is dismissed in one fell swoop. This, by a philosopher, who concludes Die Zerstrung der Vernunft with a paean of praise to Joseph Stalin as the paramount world historic thinker of his time, uniquely capable of defending reason as a movement of the masses against all enemies; a figure, who with great clarity, determined the movement and limits of world peace. One wonders what Lukacs thought of this evaluation during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 of which he was a central part, and during which the Stalinists saw him as a mortal enemy of communist world hegemony. Perhaps he might have then reflected on the Pyrrhic nature of this victory of reason over its enemies.

The contemporary figure who deals least and understands most what Gumplowicz is all about is the South African writer, living in Great Britain, Ronald Segal. In his work, The Race War, he served to amplify the range of Gumplowicz analysis, so that it extended beyond the reaches ofThe Black World of Africa and The Coloured World of Southern AmericaEurope and into the Third World, that universe which Gumplowicz as a nineteenth-century central European failed to understand, no more than most European titans of social theory. Segals analysis follows keenly Gumplowicz logic: that the question of race interests or class interests, just as race struggles and class struggles, is not some synthetic a priori written on Mosaic Tablets, but rather is the stuff of empirical investigation. Whether the structure of the world is carved up along class, racial, ethnic, sexual, or national criteria was, for Gumplowicz, open to constant reevaluation. In the work of Segal, one finds expression of this belief that something like the African continent may not be subject to class management from overseas sources; class interests may fuse, while racial interests divide. Further, such racial interests may actually provide a national rallying point against outsiders international factors. The difficulty is that achieving solutions in South Africa and Rhodesia does indeed seem to involve a good deal more than conventional rhetoric about stratification and occupation. It is not that Segal, any more than Gumplowicz, claims an innate superiority of white over blackmost emphatically this is not the case. Rather, they both vigorously argued, and quite properly, that even if certain class equilibrium is achieved, problems of ethnicity, race, and nationality may remain and even intensify. Beyond that, they seem to be saying that parceling out rather than clustering class and race as variable may provoke serious mistakes in political action, no less than the analysis of social stratification.