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Published by: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

HHR_2026_1_Trojan

Mediators of Knowledge between Marginality and Mobility: Ludwig Gumplowiczpdf
and the Making of Italian Elite Sociology*

Kornel Trojan

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War, Graz

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 15 Issue 1 (2026): 3-29 DOI 10.38145/2026.1.3

This article examines how Ludwig Gumplowicz’s trajectory from Krakow to Graz mediated between his Polish-Galician experiences and the emergence of Italian elite sociology. It argues that Gumplowicz’s sociology developed along a periphery-center-periphery path: first shaped in the conflicted milieu of Krakow, then institutionalized in Graz as part of the German-speaking academic heartlands of the Habsburg Empire, and finally reexported to the Italian-speaking Küstenland and to what was later to become a unified Italy, where it was appropriated and transformed by early elite theorists such as Gaetano Mosca and Roberto Michels.

Conceptually, the article refines center-periphery approaches by treating them as heuristic and relational rather than as fixed hierarchies. So-called peripheries appear not as passive recipients but as centers of circulation in their own right. Italian students in Graz emerge as key cultural and scholarly mediators: through their mobility, translations, and professional networks, they carried Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology southward and helped recast it into Italian elite sociology.

Empirically, the article reconstructs the multilingual, mobile university landscape of the late Habsburg Empire and traces how patronage, academic travel, and journal networks enabled the southward transfer of ideas about sociology. In doing so, it contributes to debates on transnational intellectual history, the history of sociology, and Habsburg university history, using the case of Gumplowicz to show how regional universities and student mobility played a disproportionate role in the “viral,” adaptive circulation of concepts.

Keywords: Ludwig Gumplowicz, Italian elite sociology, conflict sociology, knowledge transfer, center-periphery, Habsburg Empire, academic mobility, Roberto Michels

Introduction

Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) is, apart from Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), arguably the most internationally renowned social scientist as­sociated with the University of Graz. From a history-of-science perspective, however, his trajectory is paradoxical: a marginal, often embattled figure in the Habsburg Empire’s academic field who nonetheless became a major reference point for early Italian sociology and has been described as one of the founders of the conflict school of sociology.1 This article takes that tension as its starting point.2

Rather than focusing primarily on Gumplowicz’s outsider status in Graz or his position within Austrian academic society (as much of the secondary literature has done),3 the article poses a different question: how did Gumplowicz’s movement from Krakow to Graz enable his Polish-Galician experiences to inform and further the emergence of Italian elite sociology?

Conceptually, the article refines center-periphery approaches by showing how “intermediate” academic sites such as Graz functioned as relational nodes in a Habsburg migration space, where peripheries could act as active producers and transformers of sociological knowledge. In this case, it asks how concepts shaped in the social and national conflicts of Galicia and then appropriated in Graz were transformed and put to work within Italian sociology, especially in the development of what is now known as Italian elite theory. Geatano Mosca, Ro­ber­to Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto formulated a series of arguments about the inevitability of the concentration of power in the hands of minorities, the “circulation of elites,” and the oligarchic tendencies of modern organizations that would shape political sociology throughout the twentieth century.4

The article uses the notion of periphery-center-periphery to describe a trajectory in which ideas are formed in a provincial setting of the Habsburg Empire (Krakow), institutionalized in an imperial heartland (Graz, part of the “center”), and reexported to another periphery (the Küstenland, especially Trieste, and adjacent Italian-speaking regions and from there to a later unified Italy), where they again are transformed and help lay the foundations for Italian elite sociology in unified Italy. From this perspective, Gumplowicz’s biography is read as a movement along this arc: originating in Krakow, a provincial yet intellectually vibrant periphery of the Empire; moving to Graz, where he was able to establish his sociology; and from there, through his Italian students, reaching Italian lands within the monarchy, often seen as peripheral intellectual spaces but ones in which his theories took deep root.

In using the language of periphery and center, the article treats this framework as a heuristic rather than a fixed hierarchy. As political and academic capital, Vienna constituted the main imperial center, while Graz functioned as a secondary regional hub or “intermediate node” within a wider academic field. The term “center” is thus used for the German-speaking academic heartlands of the Habsburg Empire. A relational perspective is therefore more appropriate: positions shift with scale (local, imperial, transnational), and so-called peripheries can themselves become centers of circulation in specific networks. Graz exemplifies this dynamic. Though, below Vienna in the imperial hierarchy and home to an “outsider” like Gumplowicz, in this case, the university operated as a relay station in the southward transfer of sociological ideas. Italian students in Graz, far from passive recipients on the periphery, emerge as coproducers and transformers of knowledge whose mobility and mediation were essential to the formation of early Italian sociology.

To illuminate these processes, the article goes beyond Gumplowicz’s individual biography to reconstruct the multilingual and mobile university land­scape of the late Habsburg Empire. It traces how professional ties, patronage, and student mobility created networks of circulation that cut across formal hierarchies of center and periphery. In this configuration, Graz appears as a node linking Galician experiences and Italian receptions. Gumplowicz’s arrival in Graz was facilitated by academic networks (notably his former teacher Gustav Demelius), and his later influence in Italy depended decisively on Italian students in Graz, who acted as cultural and scholarly mediators between north and south.

By following Gumplowicz’s ideas along these routes (from Krakow to Graz and from Graz to the Italian-speaking peripheries), the discussion below examines how concepts travel between centers and peripheries; how transnational student mobility and professional networks shape the circulation of knowledge; and how intellectuals such as Gumplowicz operate as mediators who translate biographical experiences into disciplinary innovations.

In doing so, the article contributes to three interconnected debates: trans­national intellectual history (by tracing multilingual and asymmetrical networks of circulation), the history of sociology (by highlighting the role of conflict sociology in the formation of Italian elite theory), and the history of Habsburg universities and academic mobility (by showing how seemingly secondary universities like Graz could play a disproportionate role in the internationalization of knowledge).

Academic Mobility and Intellectual Exchange in the Habsburg Empire

Gumplowicz’s influence on Italian elite sociology cannot be understood without considering the intellectual and institutional environment in which his sociology took shape. The universities of the Habsburg Empire had recently undergone a period of reform. After the revolution of 1848, during a brief liberal interlude before the onset of neo-absolutism, the government introduced a series of measures that reshaped academic life. The abolition of censorship and the liberalization of exchange with non-Habsburg countries facilitated a greater circulation of people and ideas both across the provinces and beyond the Empire’s borders, creating opportunities that had been severely restricted for students and scholars under Klemens von Metternich. At the same time, the founding of an Imperial Academy of Sciences aimed to unite scholars from across the monarchy, reinforcing the role of universities as central nodes in a transnational intellectual network.5

These reforms created the conditions for a profound transformation of the sciences, which until then had largely been confined to local institutions such as museums, noble societies, and royal collections. Universities now became centers of both intellectual innovation and political debate: initially instruments of a courtly and integrative state nationalism, but increasingly contested spaces shaped by nationalist actors.

Following the liberalization of legislation after 1848, students and scholars rapidly became increasingly mobile, from the perspectives of both numbers and scope. The Habsburg universities became markedly multilingual and transregional. Gustav Otruba estimated that in 1863 almost 50 percent of the students at the University of Graz did not speak German as their first language (by 1910, this figure had declined to about 30 percent), and that in the 1890s more than 20 percent of students in Graz came from outside the Habsburg Empire. Regardless of the problematic nature of the category “mother tongue,” these statistics underscore the extent to which Habsburg universities functioned as hubs of student mobility and cross-cultural exchange.6

In this sense, the University of Graz must be seen as part of a wider network of institutions that enabled knowledge transfer across the Empire. It was pre­cisely this environment, which was multilingual, transnational, and shaped by constant circulation, that allowed Gumplowicz to formulate his sociology and connect with the Italian students who would become decisive intermediaries in carrying his ideas southward.

Krakow as Periphery: Intellectual Beginnings, Identity, Conflict, and Failure

Ludwig Gumplowicz was born in 1838 in Krakow into a German-speaking, reform-oriented Jewish family. He attended the well-known Polish-language St. Anna Gymnasium and subsequently studied law in Krakow and Vienna. After completing his degree, he worked as a lawyer, municipal politician, journalist, and editor of Kraj (Country), the first liberal daily newspaper in Krakow, and he published numerous works on Jewish history.7

The question of his identity, both religious and national, preoccupied the young Gumplowicz, son of a representative of enlightened Judaism, the Haskalah, as much as the question of Judaism itself. Which Jewish or national identity (Polish or German) should he adopt? Issues underlying these questions, such as national tensions, Jewish identity and culture, political power, and theories of the state, would later become central aspects of his sociology. Thus, his sociology was strongly shaped by his time in Krakow and his “Galician socialization.”8

Seen from the perspective of the Habsburg Empire, Krakow represented the periphery of the monarchy’s intellectual world, an environment marked by cultural hybridity, national tensions, and fragile institutional structures. It was pre­cisely this peripheral experience that sharpened Gumplowicz’s sensitivity to diversity and conflict among ethnic communities, themes that became foundational to his conflict sociology.

In the 1860s and 1870s, local politics were dominated by debates over the relationship between Jewish identities, Polish nationalism, Catholicism, and the Habs­burg state. As a lawyer, municipal politician, and editor of Kraj, Gumplowicz intervened directly in these conflicts through articles and pamphlets on Jewish emancipation and national identity. In these texts, he rejected attempts to fuse nationality with religion or “race,” analyzed the sharp tensions between Polish elites, the Catholic Church, and Jewish communities, and described Polish society as a historically evolved “amalgam” of competing collective groups. Many of these early Krakow pamphlets and journalistic texts are accessible today both in edited form, via the source collection Dwa życia Ludwika Gumplowicza, and digital facsimiles and transcribed versions in Edition Ludwig Gumplowicz, maintained by the archive of the history of sociology in Austria (AGSÖ) and the University of Graz. 9 These early writings already frame social life in terms of clashing group interests and asymmetrical power relations, foreshadowing Gumplowicz’s later formulation of the idea that the state embodies the victory of some groups over others. During the period of growing autonomy in Galicia around 1870, first, his academic ambitions were thwarted by a failed attempt at habilitation at the Jagiellonian University, and then his political-journalistic career collapsed with the bankruptcy of Kraj in 1874. After this double failure, he found himself compelled to seek a new beginning.10

New Academic Beginnings in Graz: Living for Science Rather than from It

In 1875, at the age of 37, Gumplowicz relocated with his family from Krakow to Graz. The move was less a personal decision than the product of professional and intellectual networks within the Habsburg Empire. It was likely arranged by his former teacher, Gustav Demelius (1831–1891), professor of Roman law at the Jagiellonian University.11 Demelius thus acted as a scholarly go-between, illustrating how institutional ties opened routes of mobility for intellectuals across the monarchy. Such linkages reveal how the Habsburg migration space supported not only student movement but also the cross-border careers of academics like Gumplowicz.

Once in Graz, Gumplowicz registered as a defense attorney and quickly entered the city’s intellectual life, delivering a public lecture in late September. On February 12, 1876 he applied for habilitation in legal and political philosophy. Despite initial hurdles, he received habilitation in general constitutional law on December 15, 1876 and began teaching as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Graz. 12

His Privatdozent years were financially precarious. Repeated petitions for aid mention strained circumstances. He depended on annual ministry stipends of 600–800 gulden and minimal student fees. Whether he augmented this through legal practice or exam tutoring remains unclear, but frequent changes of residence suggest that the family wrestled with financial difficulties. This meager income was all the more inadequate given that, by the time of his habilitation, Gumplowicz was 38, married, and the father of three children, ages twelve, ten, and seven. In these years, he lived for science rather than from it.13

Later, Demelius again played a decisive role by supporting Gumplowicz’s appointment as professor extraordinarius, submitting the formal application for “the appointment of Dr. Gumplowicz as professor extraordinarius.”14 This intervention highlights once more the significance of professional networks and patronage structures as mechanisms of knowledge transfer. These relationships were not only vehicles for ideas but also institutional levers that allowed scholars to gain positions, visibility, and the capacity to shape emerging disciplines. From 1882 onward, Gumplowicz received a salary of 1,200 gulden as Extraordinarius, along with an “activity allowance” of 420 gulden. With his promotion to full professor (ordinarius) in 1893, his salary rose further, ensuring financial stability in the last decades of his life.15

Institutionalizing Sociology in Graz: The Formation of Gumplowicz’s Conflict Sociology

Yet it was only after his appointment in 1882 as professor extraordinarius of constitutional and administrative law in Graz (a position that also alleviated the financial insecurities his family had faced) that Gumplowicz openly aligned himself with the then still fragile and disputed discipline of sociology. Over the course of the next decade, he published the works that defined his contribution to the field: Der Rassenkampf. Sociologische Untersuchungen (1883), Grundriß der Sociologie (1885), and Die sociologische Staatsidee (1892). His subsequent promotion in 1893 to full professor of administrative science and Austrian administrative law consolidated his standing within the University of Graz.16

As a jurist, Gumplowicz described himself as a positivist “to the point of exaggeration.”17 In sociology, which he increasingly recognized as his true intellectual domain, he adhered to a positivist method and identified as an empiricist, though he generally employed empirical material in an illustrative rather than systematic fashion. More importantly, he viewed sociology as a practical and political science, a means of explaining and legitimizing the stabilization of power and domination.18

This orientation cannot be understood without reference to the periphery-center-periphery trajectory of his career. In Krakow (periphery), his sensitivity to conflict, minority status, and national tensions first took form. In Graz (center), he could refine these experiences, transform them into theoretical frameworks, and give them disciplinary legitimacy. From there, through the mediation of his Italian students, these insights circulated southward into Italy (periphery within the Habsburg Empire), where they were reinterpreted and became foundational for the development of elite sociology.

Gumplowicz’s use of the terms “race” (Rasse) and “race struggle” (Rassen­kampf) has often led to his retrospective classification as a Social Darwinist or proponent of biological race theory. In the intellectual context of the late nineteenth century, however, his vocabulary functioned primarily as a sociological shorthand for historically formed social groups. Gumplowicz explicitly distanced himself from biologism and did not ground his analysis in hereditary racial hierarchies. Instead, he employed “race” to denote historically evolved social collectivities that distinguished themselves from others through a strong sense of shared identity and solidarity. He defined “races” in ethnic, national, religious, and political terms, rather than in the biological sense that later became increasingly prominent. For Gumplowicz, “race” was basically a sociological term. It denoted solidary groups with a strong Wir-Gefühl (sense of “we”) that differentiated themselves from others and struggled over domination and resources. Thus, he used “race struggle” to describe enduring conflicts between such groups over power and domination. He also insisted that history was a continuous process of mixture and amalgamation of these groups, a notion which again points away from rigid biological categories. 19

Gumplowicz’s insistence on the necessity of stabilizing relations of power was deeply rooted in his own encounters with the fraught conflicts among the nationalities of Cisleithania. He interpreted the sharp cleavages he observed between Polish landowning elites, Ruthenian/Ukrainian peasants, and Jewish communities, as well as the tensions among national groupings within the Habsburg monarchy, as expressions of an ongoing “eternal struggle of races,” a strong sense of “we” against “they.”20 This perspective ultimately culminated in his theory of the state, which he defined as an institutionalized form of domination: its primary function, he argued, was to translate the victory of one ethnic group (or coalition of groups) into enduring structures of subjugation. “Never and nowhere have states arisen in any other way, than through the con­quest of foreign peoples,”21 he declared. In this formulation, the essential contours of his conflict sociology become visible: society and state are inseparably linked, and the dynamics of struggle and domination lie at their very foundation.22

From Isolation to Transnational Impact: Outsider in Austria,
Founding Father Abroad

Many studies dealing with the life and work of Ludwig Gumplowicz address the theme of the marginal existence of this late Habsburg social theorist. The image of a misunderstood genius is a favored and recurrent motif in numerous biographical and autobiographical portrayals.23 Drawing to a large extent on Gumplowicz’s presentations of his own life and career, other narratives of his place and contributions have tended to depict him as a stranger who suffered personal misfortunes and Graz as his place of exile. From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, his position as a social outsider (his double hyphenated identity as a Jew in Galicia and a patriotic Pole in Cisleithania) has been linked with his vehement critique of traditional jurisprudence. Put somewhat polemically: his deviant behavior as a scholar and his minority status as a sociologist within the legal profession have been interpreted as expressions of his socially marginal position.24

This assessment can be traced back to the portrait painted of him in 1926 by his student Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943):

As a Jew and a Pole he sees things doubly “from below”; he recognizes the partie honteuse of the society and state in which he lives with full clarity […]; yet as an academically educated man he always remains a bourgeois. […] Because he saw “from below,” he penetrated to the weaknesses of the state; because he still saw far too much “from above,” he was unable to believe in anything better and cast himself into the arms of sociological pessimism.25

Gumplowicz never felt at home in Graz. In his letters to Lester F. Ward and others, he repeatedly writes of his loneliness, social withdrawal, and life in complete solitude. He laments the dissolution of the Polish student association Ognisko and even likens his years in Graz to a “Babylonian captivity.”26

Yet this intellectual and social isolation within Graz should not obscure the fact that his ideas circulated widely through other channels. Gumplowicz himself carefully cultivated the role of the misunderstood genius in his homeland. In his publications as well as in his private letters, he repeatedly portrayed himself as a prophet of the new science of sociology who was not understood in his own country. In other words, he cast himself as an unheard prophet, in a double sense, amid the intellectual barrenness of Austrian jurisprudence. Time and again, the combative Krakow scholar accused his Austrian colleagues of attempting to silence him, though he would then point out, with proud satisfaction, that abroad (namely in Italy, France, and the United States) he had received the recognition he deserved and his sociological teachings had taken root. By 1900, he already enjoyed the status of a founding father of sociology in the United States. Through Lester Ward (1841–1913) and Albion Small (1854–1926), his sociology gained wide influence.27

At the University of Graz, Gumplowicz was an outsider with his ideas, yet he was now in a position to make his research widely known through an active publishing practice, particularly abroad. This was facilitated by his multilingualism, his steadily growing network, and his fundamentally cosmopolitan outlook. He thus embodied an early example of the internationalization of research and of Graz as a site of scholarship. This cosmopolitan orientation was also reflected in the publication history of his works. As early as the 1890s, Gumplowicz’s Grundriß der Soziologie (1885) left the German-language context through translation: in 1899, it appeared in English as Outlines of Sociology, trans­lated by Frederick W. Moore and published by the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia, making Gumplowicz’s group- and conflict-oriented sociology available to an emerging American disciplinary public.28 In the Romance languages, Der Rassenkampf circulated under translated titles. Spanish bibliographical overviews note a version entitled La lucha de razas, issued by the Madrid publishing house La España Moderna at the beginning of the twentieth century.29 In Italy, Gumplowicz’s key concepts were disseminated less through full book translations than through extensive reviews, excerpts, and programmatic essays in journals such as Rivista italiana di sociologia and via the writings of mediators like Franco Savorgnan, who systematically introduced his conflict sociology to Italian readers.30 Recent historiography also stresses that by the early twentieth century, Gumplowicz’s major works were available or discussed in several languages (including English, Italian, and Spanish), a fact that underpinned his reputation. The transnational significance of Gumplowicz lies in a paradox: marginalized within Graz (one of the imperial academic centers), his sociology nevertheless found fertile ground in the peripheries of the Habsburg world, above all in Italy.

Italian Students as Mediators of Knowledge Transfer

Italian students in Graz acted as mediators who carried Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology southward, where it was not received as the marginal voice of an outsider but as a valuable theoretical resource for the emerging field of elite sociology. In a sense, Italian students at the University of Graz could also be regarded as outsiders, since despite their large numbers, Italian was not officially permitted as a language of instruction. The very fact that they studied in Graz at all was mainly due to the absence of a university in Trieste, despite repeated demands. Between 1875 and 1910, when Gumplowicz taught at the University of Graz, the student body included a significant proportion of non-German-speaking students, reflecting the multilingual and mobile character of Habsburg higher education.31

In addition to professional disputes, Gumplowicz’s years as ordinarius appear to have brought increasing ideological conflicts with certain members of the faculty.32 His animosity toward what he perceived as an increasingly Germanized academic landscape should be understood against this backdrop. His letters from these years reveal that both his Polish patriotism and his rejection of the German-speaking academic mainstream became more pronounced.33

Perhaps out of a sense of solidarity, Gumplowicz maintained especially close contact with Italian students, who were strongly represented at the University of Graz. Not only was he authorized to conduct examinations in Italian, but in 1895, he was also elected by the faculty as its representative to the administrative committee of the support fund for students.34 In these roles, he operated within professional and student networks that linked Graz to other academic centers, facilitating mobility across linguistic and national boundaries. Such networks were essential mechanisms of knowledge transfer, turning local contacts into transnational channels of intellectual circulation.35

The rise of German nationalism around 1900, with its racist undertones, was repugnant to Gumplowicz. In 1903, he wrote in a letter to a Polish colleague about a student from Lemberg enrolled at the University of Graz, whom he described as a “model pupil.”36 The young man was “diligent and talented” and focused exclusively “on his studies.” Yet at his state law examination he fell victim to “the aversion of local professors to anything that is not German.”37 His poor German proved an insurmountable obstacle. Gumplowicz reported that he had advised the Lemberg student not to attempt the examination again: “The greatest fool, if he is a German, passes, while the best candidate, whether Slovene or Pole, fails! Now there is war here, not justice!”38 At the moment, he wrote, the mood among the German professors in Graz was very tense: “politics, not merit, decided the fate of examination candidates.”39 For Gumplowicz, this experience further reinforced the importance of transnational student communities. It was through such networks, rather than through the increasingly nationalized local faculty, that knowledge could circulate across borders and shape emerging disciplines, such as Italian sociology.

The Reception of Gumplowicz’s Sociology in Italy

Gumplowicz’s position as a professor at the University of Graz, along with his sympathies for the many Italian, Hungarian, Slovene, and Croatian students there, facilitated the reception of his work in the countries of origin of these students. Building on his close personal contacts with Italian students, which gave Gumplowicz and his sociology a certain degree of popularity in Italy, an intensive scholarly exchange also developed with Italian sociologists. In the relevant Italian professional journals, Gumplowicz was frequently published and reviewed.40 He himself also valued his Italian colleagues and their contributions to the discipline of sociology. As he commented in one of his letters,

One can boldly assert that in the last three decades Italy has outstripped not only the Romance nations but also Germany in the field of political science. Not in the number of books; in that respect Germany and also France are far ahead. But in the inner value and substance of its political literature. [The Germans] have been far surpassed by Italian political science.41

In turn, Gumplowicz’s ideas were widely discussed in sociological and historical journals. First and foremost through his publications in Rivista italiana di sociologia42 (Italy’s leading sociological journal, published bimonthly), he was able to gain recognition among Italian scholars such as Gaetano Mosca, Michel Angelo Vaccaro, Mario Morasso, and Roberto Michels.43 The reception of Rassenkampf in Italy took place primarily in the context of political journalism rather than within sociology itself, which only further enhanced the popularity of this concept. Among the German-speaking sociologists received in Italy, Gumplowicz was accorded a particularly prominent status. The journal itself functioned as part of a broader professional network that connected Graz with emerging Italian centers of sociology, demonstrating how institutional platforms mediated the southward transfer of ideas. Crucially, Italian students in Graz acted as cultural and scholarly mediators. They were not merely passive recipients of Gumplowicz’s ideas but active brokers who translated his conflict sociology into their own intellectual and linguistic frameworks. By bringing these insights back to Italy, they ensured that Gumplowicz’s sociology entered into dialogue with the distinctive concerns of Italian intellectual life, particularly the emergence of elite sociology.44

Gumplowicz’s contacts in Italy and his active exchange with the scholarly community there are further demonstrated by the fact that of the 500 books and writings he bequeathed to the University of Graz Library in 1908, a substantial portion consisted of sociological works from Italy, often with personal dedications.45 He also regarded Franco Savorgnan, a native of Trieste, as his most diligent student. In a letter to the Polish historian Jan K. Kochanowski, Gumplowicz offered the following characterization: “It is an interesting fact that my most gifted student [Savorgnan] is an Italian—after him come the Slovenes and a Croat […]—and only then the Germans, but at a great distance.”46

Franco Savorgnan (1879–1963) was far more than a promising student who then disappears from view. Born in Trieste, he studied law at the University of Graz, where he became Gumplowicz’s favorite pupil, and he remained in contact with him after taking his degree in 1903. Returning to Trieste, he was active as a collaborator of the aforementioned Rivista italiana di sociologia, explicitly promoting Gumplowicz’s work in Italy and thus acting, already in the years around the turn of the century, as a key mediator between Austrian and Italian sociological milieus. In 1908, he began an academic career at the Scuola superiore di commercio in Trieste (serving as its director from 1912 to 1915), and, after taking refuge in Italy during World War I, he held chairs of statistics in Cagliari, Messina, Modena, Pisa, and finally Rome, where he held the chair of statistics and demography until 1954 and served as president of the Istituto centrale di statistica (Istat) in the 1930s and early 1940s. His early sociological writings as well as numerous reviews and essays in Rivista italiana di sociologia repeatedly cite and discuss Gumplowicz and are read in the literature as an important vehicle for the dissemination and adaptation of Austrian conflict sociology within Italian debates on elites, demography, and national questions.47

Although Savorgnan was the only Italian student of Gumplowicz whose biography can be reconstructed in detail, he was by no means an isolated case. Faculty statistics and archival records show that Italians formed one of the largest non-German groups at the University of Graz around 1900.48 While these sources rarely link individual names explicitly to Gumplowicz’s lectures, they nonetheless document a sizeable cohort of Italian law students who passed through Graz during his tenure. As Weiler and Strassoldo have emphasized, Savorgnan thus appears less as a lone disciple than as the best-documented representative of a broader, largely anonymous milieu of Italian students for whom Graz and Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology became an important intellectual reference point.49

In this sense, Gumplowicz’s sociology spread less in a linear or deterministic manner than through a dynamic of circulation and adaptation. His ideas depended on hosts: Italian students in Graz, especially Franco Savorgnan. They adopted, transmitted, and transformed Gumplowicz’s ideas within their own intellectual environment. This mechanism resonates with Michael Vogrin’s critique of technological determinism, where he describes the spread of in­novations not as an inevitable unfolding of inner logic but as a “viral” dynamic shaped by interdependent contexts.50

Italian Elite Sociology and Its Dialogue with Gumplowicz’s Conflict Sociology

What later came to be known as Italian elite sociology developed in the decades around 1900 in close connection with broader European debates about power, democracy, and mass society. The core figures usually associated with this “Italian school of elites” are Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), and Roberto Michels (1876–1936).

Although each of these authors drew on diverse intellectual resources, their work bears clear affinities with (and in some cases explicit debts to) the conflict sociology of Ludwig Gumplowicz. Italian elite sociology reworked his focus on intergroup struggle and conquest into analyses of organized minorities, party leaderships, and ruling classes. In this sense, the reception of Gumplowicz in Italy can be read as a paradigmatic instance of how concepts travel: “race struggle” and state formation, once translated into the Italian context, became key building blocks in theories of elite domination and oligarchy.51

Gaetano Mosca and the Theory of the Ruling Class

Mosca’s central contribution, first elaborated in Elementi di scienza politica 52 (1896) and later widely known through its English version The Ruling Class, 53 is the claim that in every society a politically organized minority rules over a disorganized majority. He conceptualized this minority as a “political class,” stressing not only the social and economic privileges of this class but above all its superior organization, cohesion, and control over the means of coercion and persuasion. Mosca rejected the notion of popular sovereignty as a sociological description and argued instead that all political regimes (monarchies, liberal parliamentary systems, and mass democracies alike) rest on domination by an organized elite. What changes historically is not the existence of a ruling class but its composition, recruitment patterns, and legitimating “political formula,” which consists of a set of beliefs that justify elite rule in the eyes of both rulers and ruled. Elite circulation and renewal are possible, but rule by a small group is inescapable.54

In developing this perspective, Mosca engaged with a range of authors in public law, social theory, and political science. Among these, contemporaries and later commentators have highlighted his explicit references to Ludwig Gump­lowicz. In The Ruling Class, Mosca cites Der Rassenkampf approvingly when discussing the historical struggles between social groups and the formation of ruling minorities. While he did not adopt Gumplowicz’s vocabulary of “race” uncritically, he drew on the underlying idea that the state emerges from the victory of some groups over others and the institutionalization of relations of domination.55

At the same time, Mosca shifted the analytical focus from relatively broad, quasi-ethnic “races” to more specifically political groupings. Where Gumplowicz emphasized conquests between tribes and peoples, Mosca concentrated on parties, bureaucracies, and organized elites within modern nation-states. The continuity lies in the shared insistence on conflict and inequality as constitutive features of social order; the innovation lies in recoding these conflicts as struggles between ruling and ruled, organized minorities and disorganized majorities.56

Roberto Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy

Roberto Michels, who moved between German and Italian academic milieus and joined the circle around Mosca and Pareto, radicalized these insights in his famous study Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (1911), later translated as Political Parties. Observing the German Social Democratic Party and other mass organizations, he formulated the “iron law of oligarchy”: the claim that all complex organizations, even those inspired by democratic ideals, tend inexorably to develop oligarchic leadership structures.57

For Michels, the organizational necessities of large-scale parties, being the need for delegation, professional leadership, and technical expertise, inevitably produce a leadership stratum that consolidates its position and becomes increasingly independent of the rank and file. Democracy thus generates its own oligarchies, and mass parties reproduce within themselves the same patterns of domination that they contest in wider society. Michels explicitly acknowledged his intellectual debts to both Mosca and Gumplowicz. In Political Parties, he cites Der Rassenkampf as a pioneering attempt to derive political institutions from relations of domination between social groups, and he credits Gumplowicz with having shown how the state ultimately embodies the victory of some groups over others.58

Yet, as in Mosca’s case, Michels transposed this framework from the plane of ethnic or “racial” conflict to the inner lives of parties, unions, and associations. The key antagonism in his analysis is no longer between conquering and con­quered peoples, but between party elites and ordinary members.59

In this way, Michels can be seen as translating Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology into the idiom of organizational sociology and democratic theory. The “state as conquest” becomes the “party as oligarchy.” The “eternal struggle of races” becomes the “enduring tension among leaders,” a tension that is found in the struggles among leaders within modern mass organizations.60

Italian Elite Sociology as Transformation of Conflict Sociology

Taken together, Mosca and Michels (with Pareto as a third, partly distinct figure) are often described as constituting an “Italian school of elites.” What unites them is less a shared methodology than a set of substantive claims: that elites are inescapable; that political power is concentrated in organized minorities; and that democratic forms do not abolish but reconfigure the mechanisms of domination.61

The reception of Gumplowicz’s work in Italy contributed significantly to this development. As Raimondo Strassoldo and Bernd Weiler have shown, Italian scholars engaged intensively with Der Rassenkampf, Grundriß der Soziologie, and Die sociologische Staatsidee. In the Italian context, however, the language of “race” was often downplayed or reinterpreted, and the emphasis shifted toward political organization, elites, and the mechanisms of rule.62

From this perspective, Italian elite sociology can be read as a creative trans­formation of Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology under new institutional and intel­lectual conditions. Some prominent lines of continuity and revision stand out.

From race struggle to elite-mass conflict

The fact that Mosca and Michels moved from Gumplowicz’s language of “race struggle” (Rassenkampf) to a vocabulary of elites and masses is best understood in its historical and intellectual context. Around 1880–1900, Gumplowicz still used Rasse in a broadly sociological sense to denote historically grown collectivities (ethnic, national, religious, or political groups) rather than biological races in the later, strictly racist sense. Contemporary readers like Sarah E. Simons also treated “race” in sociological debates as a flexible category of group difference and conflict, not as any notion of rigid biological essence.63

By the time Mosca and Michels were developing their theories (1890s–1910s), the semantic and political landscape had shifted. “Race” was increasingly tied to biological racism and eugenic discourse, especially in Central and Western Europe, and less suited for the kind of general theory of power in constitutional states that they were after. Mosca’s central problem was not inter-ethnic conflict but the persistence of minority rule in formally liberal regimes. He therefore recast Gumplowicz’s conflict perspective in terms of classe politica and “ruling class”: a structurally organized minority that governs a disorganized majority on the basis of organization, competence, and control of key resources rather than racial properties. Drawing on his experiences with mass parties and trade unions, Michels likewise shifted the focus from quasi-ethnic “races” to the internal dynamics of modern organizations. His “iron law of oligarchy” explains how leadership cliques inevitably form within democratic parties and unions because of the technical demands of organization and representation. Here, the central opposition is no longer among competing “races” but between the leaders and the led within mass democracy.64

In this sense, Mosca and Michels retain Gumplowicz’s core intuition (history as structured by enduring conflicts between unequal groups), but they translate it into a new grammar that better fits the political and intellectual conditions of turn-of-the-century Italy and Germany. As Raimondo Strassoldo and Jan Pakulski have argued, classical elite theory generalizes earlier conflict sociology (including Gumplowicz) into a theory of organized minorities and disorganized majorities, sidelining “race” in favor of institutional, organizational, and political categories. This shift also reflects the Italians’ substantive interests: they were less concerned with the multiethnic tensions of the Habsburg world than they were with the crises of liberal parliamentarism, clientelism, and mass parties in a recently unified nation-state.65

From conquest to organization

According to Gumplowicz’s theory, the state originates in conquest: victorious groups subjugate the defeated and transform this asymmetry into lasting structures of rule. “Race struggle” is thus the motor of history, and the state is little more than the stabilized outcome of successful domination.66 Mosca and Michels retained the idea that all political order rests on inequality and domination, but they reframed it in terms of organization rather than conquest. For Mosca, every society is divided between the ruling class and the ruled, and the persistence of elite rule depends less on original acts of violence than on the superior “political organization” of minorities, meaning control of the administrative machinery, parties, and means of persuasion.67 Analyzing modern mass parties, Michels radicalized this insight into his “iron law of oligarchy”: even organizations founded on democratic and egalitarian ideals tend, as they grow, to concentrate power in the hands of a professional leadership that monopolizes information and technical expertise.68

Italian elite theorists thus translated Gumplowicz’s emphasis on conflict and domination into a language attuned to the problems of early twentieth-century mass politics. Instead of conquering “races,” it is now disciplined party elites, parliamentary leaders, and bureaucratic cadres who secure and reproduce power. What remains from Gumplowicz is the anti-harmonistic premise that inequality is structural rather than accidental. What changes is the analytic focus, from ethnically or historically defined collectivities to the organizational mechanisms that allow small, cohesive minorities to rule over large, fragmented majorities in formally democratic regimes.69

From static hierarchy to circulation and adaptation

Whereas Gumplowicz’s account sometimes presents relations of domination as relatively stable outcomes of conquest (enduring hierarchies in which victorious groups impose lasting control over the vanquished), Italian elite sociologists placed greater emphasis on the circulation and renewal of ruling minorities over time. Mosca conceptualized the “classe politica” not as a fixed caste but as a re­latively small group that is continually replenished and partially reshaped through recruitment, cooptation, and the selective opening of political and administrative careers to outsiders. Stability lies less in the permanence of specific families or factions than in the persistence of a ruling minority as such.70 Working on parties and unions rather than state elites, Michels similarly analyzed how leadership strata are reproduced and replaced within mass organizations: new cohorts of leaders emerge, consolidate their position, and may eventually be challenged and succeeded by rivals, even as the oligarchic structure of organization remains in place.71 In both cases, the focus shifts from a comparatively static image of “races” locked in struggle to a more dynamic understanding of how elites adapt, renew themselves, and integrate segments of the masses, a move that, while retaining Gumplowicz’s core insight about structural inequality, translates it into a theory of elite rotation under modern conditions of mass politics.72

Whereas Gumplowicz sometimes appears to treat group domination as relatively stable, Italian elite sociologists emphasized the circulation and replacement of elites over time. In Mosca’s case, this appears as the gradual renewal of the classe politica; in Michels’s work, as the succession of leadership cohorts within parties and unions.73

Strassoldo has argued that the strong Austrian (and specifically Graz) imprint on early Italian sociology is often underestimated in standard narratives that focus solely on Italian intellectual traditions.74 When viewed from the vantage point of the Habsburg migration space reconstructed in this article, Italian elite sociology appears less as a purely national innovation and more as the product of a transnational dialogue: Gumplowicz’s conflict sociology, formulated in Graz by a Polish Jew, was appropriated, translated, and reworked by Italian students and scholars who stood at the intersection of several academic cultures.

The importance of Italian elite sociology lies in the way in which it unsettles optimistic narratives of democratic self-rule. Mosca’s theory of the classe politica argued that in every political order a cohesive minority monopolizes key positions and skills, justifying its rule through ideological formulas that claim to represent the common good. Elite circulation and renewal are possible, but rule by a small group is inescapable. Michels made a similar point in his famous “iron law of oligarchy”: even organizations founded on egalitarian ideals, such as socialist parties and trade unions, evolve oligarchic leaderships once they become large and bureaucratic. These theories became foundational not only for sociology, but also for political science, shaping twentieth-century debates on parties, parliamentarism, fascism, and liberal democracy well beyond Italy. Elite sociology intersected with wider intellectual and political crises: the fragility of liberal parliamentarism after unification, the social question, and later the rise of fascism. Mosca’s and Michels’s diagnoses of oligarchy were read both as critiques of existing regimes and as warnings about the vulnerabilities of mass democracy. Their work traveled quickly into broader European debates and continues to inform contemporary research on political elites, technocracy, and democratic backsliding.75

In this sense, Italian elite sociology is not simply an Italian response to mass democracy but also a specific reconfiguration of Habsburg conflict sociology under Italian conditions. The case of Mosca and Michels thus exemplifies the broader argument of this article: intellectual trajectories in the late Habsburg Empire were shaped by student mobility, multilingual networks, and intermediary centers such as Graz, which allowed concepts like Rassenkampf to travel, mutate, and eventually underpin new theoretical traditions, such as Italian elite sociology.

Conclusion

This article set out to show how Ludwig Gumplowicz’s trajectory from Krakow to Graz enabled his Polish-Galician experiences to inform and further the emergence of Italian elite sociology. It has argued, first, that Italian students in Graz were the decisive agents of this transfer: far from passive recipients at the periphery, they acted as cultural and scholarly mediators who translated, adapted, and circulated his conflict sociology in Italian intellectual contexts. Second, it has shown that Graz functioned not as an endpoint but as an intermediate node within a wider Habsburg and European academic field, or in other words as a relay station of sorts linking Galician experiences to Italian receptions. Third, it has suggested that the language of periphery and center is best understood relationally: once student mobility and professional networks are taken seriously, peripheries can themselves become centers of circulation within specific con­stel­lations.

Seen in this light, the case of Gumplowicz’s biography exemplifies how knowledge transfer between centers and peripheries depended on movement, mediation, and institutional settings: concepts forged in a provincial context (Krakow), consolidated in an imperial heartland (Graz), and reexported to another periphery (the Küstenland and Italian-speaking lands) were repeatedly reinterpreted and repurposed. Rather than a simple diffusion from a stable core to a passive periphery, the circulation of Gumplowicz’s sociology appears as a “viral,” adaptive process in which ideas were constantly reshaped by the itineraries of students, the agendas of journals, and the opportunities and constraints of the Habsburg migration space.

More broadly, the article uses Gumplowicz not primarily to “rediscover” a neglected sociologist but to demonstrate how intellectual mobility and mediation actually worked in the late nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire. It contributes to three interconnected debates.

(1) In transnational intellectual history, it offers a concrete case of how concepts travel through multilingual, asymmetrical networks, highlighting the role of intermediate nodes like Graz and of students as coproducers rather than mere conduits of ideas.

(2) In the history of sociology, it shows that early Italian elite sociology did not emerge solely from national intellectual traditions but was decisively shaped by a conflict-sociological perspective developed by a Galician Jew in a provincial capital of the Empire and carried southward by academic migrants.

(3) In the history of Habsburg universities and academic mobility, it de­monstrates that so-called “minor” universities could play a disproportionate role in the internationalization of knowledge precisely because they concentrated mobile, multilingual student populations and were embedded in dense pro­fes­sional networks.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the Habsburg migration space functioned as a catalyst for disciplinary innovation in European social thought. By tracing how Gumplowicz’s ideas were formed, institutionalized, and trans­formed along a periphery-center-periphery trajectory, the article underscores that intellectual history cannot be written solely from the perspectives of canonical centers but must also account for those intermediate sites and mobile actors whose movements turned individual experiences of migration into en­during reconfigurations of sociology well into the twentieth century.

Archival Sources

Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [Archive of the National Library in Warsaw]

Listy Ludwika Gumplowicza do Jana Karola Kochanowskiego, 15.1.1905. [Letters of Ludwik Gumplowicz to Karol Kochanowski, January 15, 1905]

Narodowa Biblioteka Ossolineum [National Ossolineum Library]

Sign. 7669/II, number 469, letter from Gumplowicz to Oswald Balzer, October 19, 1913.

Universitätsarchiv Graz [University Archive Graz] (UAG)

Faculty of Law, number 692 ex box 1880/81, Sitzungsprotokoll, 4.7.1881.

Faculty of Law, number 1110–1227 ex 1899/1900, list.

Faculty of Law, number 240 ex box 1895/96, Sitzungsprotokoll, 12.12.1895.

Rectorate, Vereinswesen, fasc. 31, no. 64, “Ognisko,” 1893; Ritter Luschin von Ebengreuth, Bericht über das Studienjahr 1904/05, 11–13.

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  1. 1 Ward, “Ludwig Gumplowicz”; Horowitz, “Ludwig Gumplowicz,” vii–viii.

  2. 2 Kruse, Geschichte der Soziologie, 120. On the rediscovery of Ludwik Gumplowicz, see Trojan, “Prophet im eigenen Land?” 91, note 2.

  3. 3 Ibid. 91–105.

  4. 4 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 9–11.

  5. 5 Surman, “The Circulation of Scientific Knowledge,” 166.

  6. 6 Otruba, “Die Nationalitäten- und Sprachenfrage,” 100.

  7. 7 Surman and Mozetič, “Ludwik Gumplowicz i jego socjologia,” 28–36.

  8. 8 Kozinska-Witt, Die Krakauer Jüdische Reformgemeinde, 87–90.

  9. 9 Surman and Mozetič, Dwa życia Ludwika Gumplowicza; Mozetič, Edition Ludwig Gumplowicz.

  10. 10 Surman and Mozetič, Dwa życia Ludwika Gumplowicza, 14–23, 35–39.

  11. 11 Żebrowski, Ludwig Gumplowicz: Eine Bio-Bibliographie, 10.

  12. 12 Weiler, “Die akademische Karriere von Ludwig Gumplowicz in Graz,” 4–10.

  13. 13 Ibid., 17–19.

  14. 14 Universitätsarchiv Graz (UAG), Juridische Fakultät, Zahl 692 ex Karton 1880/81, Sitzungsprotokoll, 4.7.1881.

  15. 15 Weiler, “Die akademische Karriere von Ludwig Gumplowicz in Graz,” 18.

  16. 16 Weiler, “Analysen und Materialien … Teil I,” 21–42; Weiler, “Analysen und Materialien … Teil II,” 3–54; Weiler, “Die akademische Karriere von Ludwig Gumplowicz in Graz,” 3–19.

  17. 17 Oppenheimer, “Zur Einführung” x.

  18. 18 Feichtinger, Wissenschaft als reflexives Projekt, 357.

  19. 19 Mozetič, “Ludwig Gumplowicz – ein Grazer Pionier der Soziologie,” 435, 441; Simons, “Social Assimilation. I,” 790–91.

  20. 20 Gumplowicz, Die sociologische Staatsidee, 46–48.

  21. 21 Gumplowicz, Grundriß der Soziologie, 99.

  22. 22 Mozetič, “Ludwig Gumplowicz auf dem Weg von der Jurisprudenz zur Soziologie,” 159.

  23. 23 Mozetič, “Ein unzeitgemäßer Soziologe. Ludwig Gumplowicz”; Müller, “Universitäre Parias und engagierte Dilettanten”; Feichtinger, Wissenschaft als reflexives Projekt, 356–57.

  24. 24 Weiler, “Analysen und Materialien … Teil II,” 5–6.

  25. 25 Oppenheimer, “Zur Einführung”, xxii.

  26. 26 Stern, “The Letters of Ludwig Gumplowicz to Lester F. Ward,” 12, 18; Müller, Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909), 17–19; UAG, Rektorat, Vereinswesen, fasc. 31, no. 64, “Ognisko,” 1893; Ritter Luschin von Ebengreuth, Bericht über das Studienjahr 1904/05, 11–13; Weiler, “Analysen und Materialien … Teil II,” 6–7.

  27. 27 Feichtinger, Wissenschaft als reflexives Projekt, 357; Acham, “Ludwig Gumplowicz und der Beginn der soziologischen Konflikttheorie,” 199–201.

  28. 28 Gumplowicz, Outlines of Sociology, 1899.

  29. 29 Gumplowicz, La lucha de razas.

  30. 30 Strassoldo, “La sociologia austriaca e la sua ricezione in Italia.”

  31. 31 Surman, “The Circulation of Scientific Knowledge,” 168.

  32. 32 Weiler, “Analysen und Materialien … Teil II,” 15–25, 29–45.

  33. 33 National Ossolineum Library, sign. 7669/II, number 469, letter from Gumplowicz to Oswald Balzer, October 19, 1903. On his critique of the German-speaking scholarly world: “Somehow these Germans are not very profound (sit venia verbo). One reaches the bottom rather quickly, one does not go deeper—they are superficial. I am convinced that the Germans are in a state of intellectual decadence. Even the best sociologist among them, even Ratzenhofer, whom I have always praised and who had very good ideas, is not profound. In him, too, one can detect a certain shallowness, which makes even the sociology published after his death seem unpleasant.” National Ossolineum Library, letter from Gumplowicz to Oswald Balzer, October 19, 1903.

  34. 34 UAG, Faculty of Law, number 1110–1227 ex 1899/1900, list.

  35. 35 UAG, Faculty of Law, number 240 ex box 1895/96, Sitzungsprotokoll, December 12, 1895.

  36. 36 National Ossolineum Library, sign. 7669/II, number 469, letter from Gumplowicz to Oswald Balzer, October 19, 1903.

  37. 37 Ibid.

  38. 38 Ibid.

  39. 39 Ibid.

  40. 40 Strassoldo, “La sociologia austriaca e la sua ricezione in Italia”; Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 28–29.

  41. 41 Archive of the National Library in Warsaw, Letters of Ludwik Gumplowicz to Jan Karol Kochanowski, January 15, 1905.

  42. 42 Rivista italiana di sociologia, Rom/Turin, 1897–1986.

  43. 43 Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 49.

  44. 44 Strassoldo, “La sociologia austriaca e la sua ricezione in Italia,” 403–421; Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 28–29.

  45. 45 Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 29.

  46. 46 Gumplowicz, letter to Jan K. Kochanowski, 14.1.1909, in Surman and Mozetič, Dwa życia Ludwika Gumplowicza, 416–18.

  47. 47 Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 26–30; Strassoldo, “La sociologia austriaca e la sua ricezione in Italia,” 404–8.

  48. 48 UAG, Faculty of Law, number 1110–1227 ex 1899/1900, 11–13.

  49. 49 Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 28–29.

  50. 50 Vogrin, “Why Technological Determinism Is Still Alive,” 186-90.

  51. 51 Strassoldo, “The Austrian Influence on Italian Sociology,” 101–4.

  52. 52 Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica.

  53. 53 Mosca, The Ruling Class.

  54. 54 Barnes, “Some Contributions of Sociology to Modern Political Theory,” 492–95.

  55. 55 Martinelli, “Gaetano Mosca’s Political Theories,” 25–27.

  56. 56 Strassoldo, “The Austrian Influence on Italian Sociology,” 104–8.

  57. 57 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 10–11. Michels, Political Parties.

  58. 58 Genett, “Demokratische Sozialpädagogik in der Krise der Aufklärung,” 75–76.

  59. 59 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 11–12.

  60. 60 Genett, “Demokratische Sozialpädagogik in der Krise der Aufklärung,” 76.

  61. 61 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 10–11.

  62. 62 Strassoldo, “The Austrian Influence on Italian Sociology,” 101–17. Weiler, “Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) und sein begabtester Schüler,” 26–32, 49–50.

  63. 63 Simons, “Social Assimilation. I,” 790–95.

  64. 64 Di Giulio, “Did Elitists Really Believe in Social Laws?” 57–59.

  65. 65 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 10–13; Strassoldo, “The Austrian Influence on Italian Sociology,” 101–3.

  66. 66 Gumplowicz, Grundriß der Soziologie, 99–100.

  67. 67 Mosca, The Ruling Class, 50–57.

  68. 68 Michels, Political Parties, 50–52

  69. 69 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 10–13.

  70. 70 Mosca, The Ruling Class, 50–54.

  71. 71 Michels, Political Parties, 241–45.

  72. 72 Di Giulio, “Did Elitists Really Believe in Social Laws?” 57–59.

  73. 73 Genett, “Demokratische Sozialpädagogik in der Krise der Aufklärung,” 75; Pakulski, “The Develop­ment of Elite Theory,” 11.

  74. 74 Strassoldo, “The Austrian Influence on Italian Sociology,” 116–17.

  75. 75 Pakulski, “The Development of Elite Theory,” 9–13.

* This article was conducted at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War Graz – Vienna – Raabs in partnership with Karl Franzens University Graz and benefited from the research trips resulting from projects supported by the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria.

I am deeply grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and Szabolcs László, whose careful reading and generous feedback greatly contributed to clarifying the argument and strengthening the final version of this article.