Mediators of Knowledge between Marginality and Mobility: Ludwig Gumplowicz
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