Franz Oppenheimer

Franz Oppenheimer (1864 to 1943) was a German-American sociologist and political economist best known for the sociology of the state. Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, he practised medicine before turning to social economics, earned a doctorate at Kiel in 1909, and in 1919 took the first chair of sociology in Germany, at Goethe University in Frankfurt. In Der Staat (1907, translated as The State in 1922) he rejected the social contract and argued that the state arose when conquering groups subjected defeated ones. He also drew up the cooperative farming plan used at Merhavia in Palestine, and fled Nazi persecution in 1938 to settle in Los Angeles.