Other historical political philosophers associated with having "conflict theories" include Jean Bodin, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel.
Although Ward and Gumplowicz developed their theories independently they had much in common and approached conflict from a comprehensive anthropological and evolutionary point-of-view as opposed to Marx's rather exclusive focus on economic factors.
Gumplowicz, in Grundriss der Soziologie (Outlines of Sociology, 1884), describes how civilization has been shaped by conflict between cultures and ethnic groups.
There are no barbaric tribes in our neighborhood to be sure — but let no one is deceived, their instincts lie latent in the populace of European states.Conflict theories were popular in early sociology, and accordingly often date back to the early 1900s founders of Sociology, and particularly the ideas of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, and Lester Frank Ward.
[10] Karl Marx (1818–1883) based his conflict theory on a dialectical materialist account of history, Marxism posited that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions leading to its own destruction.
Marx ushered in radical change, advocating proletarian revolution and freedom from the ruling classes, as well as critiqued political economy.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.Lester Frank Ward directly attacked and attempted to systematically refute the elite business class' laissez-faire philosophy as espoused by the hugely popular social philosopher Herbert Spencer.
At the most basic level, Ward saw human nature itself to be deeply conflicted between self-aggrandizement and altruism, between emotion and intellect, and between male and female.
[12][13] Ward was more optimistic than Marx and Gumplowicz and believed that it was possible to build on and reform present social structures with the help of sociological analysis.
He theorized that the policies of the power elite would result in "increased escalation of conflict, production of weapons of mass destruction, and possibly the annihilation of the human race.
In 1983 he founded the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide.