Hugo Otto Engelmann (September 11, 1917 – February 2, 2002) was an American sociologist, anthropologist and general systems theorist.

Born September 11, 1917, in Vienna, Austria, Engelmann arrived in the United States in 1939, just two weeks before World War II broke out in Europe.

[2] In the 1960s Engelmann regularly participated in civil rights marches and was a strong advocate for racial and gender equality at a time when neither could be taken for granted even at universities.

In the early 1970s one of his papers - an analysis of bussing and neighborhood schools—was quoted in a successful desegregation suit of Milwaukee Public Schools initiated by Lloyd Barbee.

It insisted it was "a journal of communication, published cooperatively by its contributors, under the auspices of WSA Wisconsin Sociological Association.

Communications may cover any subject matter of concern to social scientists in their respective roles as scientific workers, teachers, and professional employees.

In his paper "A Sociohistorical Perspective for East European Developments"[8] he made his point even more forcefully, "While totalitarianism derives from psychological rigidity, authoritarian rule depends on external enforcement of regulations through power exercise."

[9] Researchers are prone to focus on the physical manifestations of people's activity, such as pottery, tools, or weapons, but ignore their experiential patterns.

Matthew Omolesky, in his 2009 article about the European Union, "Between Rome and Byzantium," cites Engelmann's observation about the geographic similarity between the Common Market and Charlemagne's Empire too.

A recurring theme in Engelmann's work refers to professional manipulators engaging others in activity for its own sake regardless of its nature or consequences.

Whether God created the heavens and the earth in six days or whether there are parallel universes have nothing whatsoever to do with science no matter how gladly true believers would have it so.

His hypotheses were on target whether about aggression, random violence, cultural closure, anti-intellectualism, diminishing freedoms, or scientific viewpoints.

[12] Those groups most likely to emerge and to persist are the ones that amount to one-third of the total population, whether they be ethnic enclaves in the city,[13] students protesting in the streets, social movements coming to the fore, or local governments on the rise.

In other words, “…ideas limited by one’s own social position will be biased…Engelmann argued that scientific observations (and laws) are societally invariate--true across the entire society.” [15] In Engelmann's office hung two photos, one of Martin Luther King Jr., the other of Albert Einstein.

Their views on society, which were very similar to those of Engelmann, became many years later the source of an article by one of his former students called "The Preacher and the Physicist".