Ludwik Krzywicki

Ludwik Krzywicki (1859 to 1941) was a Polish Marxist anthropologist, economist and sociologist, an early champion of sociology in Poland who approached historical materialism from a sociological viewpoint. Born in Płock into an impoverished aristocratic family, he studied mathematics at the University of Warsaw, was expelled from the faculty of medicine for political activity, and went abroad to Leipzig, Zürich and in 1885 Paris, where he began studying anthropology, archaeology and ethnology. Between 1900 and 1914 he excavated hill forts in Samogitia, publishing Ancient Samogitia in 1908, and he is known for his theory of the migration of ideas, by which ideas born of social needs can travel to places not yet able to express them and speed their development. He helped translate Karl Marx's Das Kapital into Polish, edited the paper of the Socialist Party during the Revolution of 1905, and after the First World War was a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1919 to 1936, vice-director of the Central Statistical Office and director of the Socio-Economic Institute. Injured in the defence of Warsaw in 1939, when a bomb destroyed his apartment and most of his papers, he died in 1941.