Paul von Lilienfeld

Paul Frommhold Ignatius von Lilienfeld-Toal (1829 to 1903) was a Baltic German politician and social scientist of imperial Russia. He was governor of the Courland Governorate from 1868 to 1885 and later a senator of the Russian Empire, taking pride in his part in the emancipation of the serfs. Alongside his administrative duties he wrote on social science, publishing Thoughts on the Social Science of the Future first in Russian (1872) and then in German as Gedanken uber die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft (1873 to 1881). In it he laid out his organic theory of societies, also called the social organism theory or organicist sociology, which treats society as a true organism whose cells are individual people, rather than a superorganism as Herbert Spencer proposed. He was vice-president (1896) and then president (1897) of the Institut International de Sociologie in Paris, founded by Rene Worms. One account describes him as a Russian functionary who treated sociology as an intellectual diversion; he remains best known for organicism.