Gustav Ratzenhofer

Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842 to 1904) was an Austrian army officer who became a philosopher and sociologist. Born in Vienna, he trained as a watchmaker, entered the army as a cadet in 1859 and rose to the General Staff, to director of the Army Archives in 1878 and to president of the Military High Court in 1898. After leaving the army in 1901 he gave himself wholly to private study, strongly influenced by his contacts with Ludwig Gumplowicz. He built his sociology on the work of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Auguste Comte as one part of a comprehensive philosophy he called positive monism, and he offered an evolutionary model of social development in which innate interests drive all social action, early societies are ruled by a law of absolute hostility, and conflict and conquest lead through the state to a civilization of peaceful reconciliation of interests. He was received in the United States as one of the founders of political sociology. He died at sea in 1904 while returning from the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science.