Bio: (1864-1943) German sociologist and political economist. Franz Oppenheimer completed his medical studies in Berlin and then worked as a doctor. At the end of the nineteenth century, he left the medical profession and began writing articles and books on political, economic, and sociological topics. From 1909 he taught economics and sociology at the universities of Berlin and Frankfurt and was also a visiting professor in France and the United States.

               Social Organism

Oppenheimer developed his macro-sociological approach under the influence of Word, Giddings, Edward Ross, and Gumplowicz. He also developed his epistemological-methodological approach. He saw sociology as a general science of society, while he taught of society itself as an organism. Sociology approaches, in a special way, the results of research of all other social sciences because it needs to determine the general laws and the "normal" state of the social organism. To achieve this goal, sociology should apply the deductive method. This type of analysis enables the determination of historical regularities, that is, general laws.

With the help of sociology and the philosophy of law, the normal state of the social organism can be determined. Normal is a society that is regulated by justice. Justice comes from a sense of justice, and that sense is of socio-psychological origin. This sense of justice is similar to the concept of natural law. From that, it follows that justice should be defined as restricting the complete freedom of individuals in order to enable cooperation in society. The principle of justice should be applied to all social groups, especially in states. The task of sociology is to determine how far a society is from the ideal of justice or the normal state. In addition, since sociology has general deterministic laws, it can determine the social, political, or economic causes of deviations from the norm.

                                            Social Evolution

Oppenheimer studied social evolution and came up with the law of systematic uniformity in the origin of several social areas: state, law, property, and class. He believed that, in the societies that existed before the state, there was no use of economic means in order to achieve economic or political goals. Each individual worked for himself and not for someone else. It was only when one group of people subjugated another group by political means and took their fields, that wealth was created based on the work of other (subjugated) people. This transpires by the process of warrior tribes invading and conquering the territory of a peaceful people. When the conquest was over, then the conquering group consolidated itself as the nobility and established a monopoly over land ownership (agricultural land).

The land monopoly led to the emergence of other monopolies. In this way, classes were created, as was the state. The state is a product of the need to normatively regulate the monopoly ownership of the land, so the emergence of the state led to the creation of a legal system. The specific legal form of land monopoly regulation has varied throughout history, and from state to state. Somewhere the subjugated population worked as a slave force on the land of the slave owners, while in other societies there were serfs or semi-independent tenants of the land, who paid taxes or feudal levies to the owner of the land. Oppenheimer is very explicit in his view that every primitive state was created by conquest and that power has no other purpose than to enable the economic exploitation of the conquered population, by the conquerors. Since land and other monopolies are not based on labor, but on conquest, this order is not in accordance with natural law and justice.

                                       Economic Theory

Oppenheimer applied the economic theory of marginal benefit to formulate a law concerning the outflow of population from the countryside. This law claims that the size of emigration from the countryside is directly proportional to the size of the land owned by the landowners and inversely proportional to the number of rural estates owned by small landowners. When the number of inhabitants in a country grows, the profit rate of industrial products increases, and the profit rate of land products decreases. This leads to migration from the countryside to the cities, which increases competition among industrial workers, thus reducing workers' wages. As a result, the price of industrial products decreases, and the demand for agricultural products increases. Oppenheimer applied his economic and political theories to the analysis of the situation in Germany at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In Germany, large feudal landowners (Junkers) owned almost all the land. As these landowners appropriated all the benefits of increasing the prices of agricultural products and reducing the prices of industrial products, the rural population moved even more en masse to cities or overseas countries.

Oppenheimer used the analysis of the influence of land monopolies and the theory of marginal benefits to formulate his explanation of the course of the entire world history. Primitive hunters and Neolithic farmers did not have land monopolies but were created by nomadic pastoralists who conquered the territories of the agricultural population during the Bronze Age. By conquering, nomadic cattle breeders created states on the territory of the Mediterranean, India, China, Mesopotamia, but also in the Andes. Ancient Rome was marked by vast land holdings controlled by the land aristocracy and on which a huge number of slaves worked. The consequences of such a system were hunger, poverty, and depopulation, which led to the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The Germanic tribes, on the remnants of the Roman Empire, created new states in which semi-feudal land relations existed. In some countries, the peasants were in a relatively independent position from the landowners and were organized into peasant cooperatives. The prosperity of the cities, which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages, depended on the relative independence of the peasants and their good economic condition. Since the 16th century, the absolutist states deprived the feudal lords of their primacy, destroys rural cooperatives, and introduces a professional bureaucratic class to run the state. As the absolutist state failed to solve the problems between the landed aristocracy and the peasants, the French Revolution ensued.

                                             Cooperatives

Oppenheimer found a solution to the situation that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century, in Germany, but also in other countries, and which was not in accordance with justice and natural law, in the creation of agricultural cooperatives of small owners. Such cooperatives would enable a much larger part of the population to live in the countryside, which would reduce emigration to industrial cities or migration to other countries. A decline in the supply of industrial labor would lead to an increase in industrial wages, which, in turn, would lead to an increase in the purchasing power of factory workers. The creation of cooperatives of industrial and similar producers in the cities would be the next step, followed by the creation of a federation of cooperatives at the level of the entire state. The end product of this process would be the creation of a peaceful federation of all cooperatives across the planet. Such a world federation of cooperatives would enable a compromise between individual and collective goals, and the creative spirit of each nation would be absorbed.

Main works

Die Siedlungsgenossenschaft (1896);

Versuch einer positiven Überwindung des Kommunismus durch Lösung des Genossenschaftsproblems und der Agrarfrage (1896);

Englischer Imperialismus (1905);

Der Staat (1907);

System der Soziologie: Theorie der reinen und politischen Ökonomie (1910); 

Die soziale Frage und der Sozialismus: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der marxistischen Theorie (1912);

Wege zur Gemeinschaft (1927).

Works translated into English:

What Does Revelation Mean for the Modern Jew: Rosenzweig, Buber, Fackenheim (1985);

Land Tenure in Palestine (2015);

The State (2018, in German 1907);

The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically 1914 (2019).