Austro-American Group Struggle Tradition

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By Sinisa Malesevic:

"Although there is a substantial diversity in the bellicose paradigm of classical social thought, the underlining logic of their general argument is broadly similar – social life is mostly characterized by conflict between distinct groups. In their analyses, violence and war play a vital role either as the principal means of collective struggle or as social mechanisms used to acquire or maintain power. Although Ludwig Gumplowicz, Gustav Ratzenhofer and Lester Ward are today either ignored or mentioned only as marginal representatives of continental and American Social Darwinism, their concepts and theories have little, if anything, in common with Darwin-ism. In fact, Gumplowicz’s positivist sociology is in many respects an epistemological predecessor of Durkheim as he was the first sociologist who argued that social facts have sui generis quality and that social life cannot be reduced to biological or psychological realities. Gumplowicz was critical of attributing a biological and organicist imagery to social processes arguing that society is no more than an aggregate of collectivities: ‘the real elements of a social process are not separate individuals but groups’ (Gumplowicz [1883]2007: 39). In his theory, groups determine individual thoughts and behaviour and as such are prone to interminable conflicts. His most important work, Der Rassenkampf(1883),argues that groups are the key generators of social action held together by intensive feelings of inter-collective solidarity rooted in cultural similarity and joint action, a process he referred to assyngenism.3As a potent source of collective cohesion developed over a long historical period, Syngenism fosters ethnocentric feelings, thus pitting groups against each other. In his cyclical view of history, group struggle is the foundation of social change: social life is inherently violent as one group conquers another. Syngenic divisions encouraged the formation of hordes, clans and tribes, all of which engaged in periodic raids and warfare. Gumplowicz traces the origins of family, private property and law to these violent group pillages where winning warriors would capture women, goods and exercise rights over the captives while attempting to exterminate the losing group. Moreover, the origin of the state as a centralized, territorially based organization is located in warfare. According to Gumplowicz (1899), the state emerges through a violent process whereby one group subjugates another and in so doing institutionalizes slavery and direct exploitation of the conquered group. As this process intensifies, smaller groups become amalgamated into a larger and better organized entity underpinned by a highly stratified division of labour. This is ideologically enhanced by the emergence of a legal system which is devised solely to reinforce the privileged position of the conquering group. For Gumplowicz, this is seen as a universal phenomenon which is replicated in a more complex form in modernity as states fight wars of supremacy and conquest. The advancement of human civilization is linked to warfare as culture, art and science emerge through successful conquest: the victories in war create an aristocratic parasitic leisure class that turns defeated warriors into workers. Despite the apparent complexity of modern societies and states, Gumplowicz argues that group struggle retains its intensity and operates on basically the same principles throughout history.

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241647433_How_Pacifist_Were_the_Founding_Fathers_War_and_Violence_in_Classical_Sociology)