VOGELSANG, KARL, baron of. – Catholic sociologist, born on 3 September 1818 at Liegnitz (Silesia), died in Vienna on 8 November 1890.
He studied law and political science at Bonn, Rostock, and Berlin, then entered the service of the Prussian State. Dissatisfied with Frederick William IV’s yielding conduct toward the Revolution of 1848, he left the State service and devoted himself to administering his estates in Mecklenburg. He took a keen interest in the religious and social questions of the time and from then on became an advocate of corporatism based on social reforms. In 1850, under the influence of Emanuele, Baron von Ketteler, the future bishop of Mainz, he converted and entered the Catholic Church at Innsbruck. It thus became impossible for him to continue living with his Protestant relatives and fellow countrymen in Mecklenburg; after years of wandering and hardship, in 1864 he went to Austria, where he found a second homeland. In Vienna, in 1875, he assumed the editorship of the conservative Catholic newspaper Vaterland. In 1879 he founded the Österreichische Monatsschrift für Gesellschaftswissenschaft und Volkswirtschaft. Together with M. Schindler, Carlo Lueger, and Prince Luigi von Lichtenstein, he introduced the Christlich-soziale Bewegung. V. Austria. He was one of the most brilliant theoreticians of Christian socialism and of the organic ordering of society. He was a man who viewed life with an entirely Catholic mind and regarded the Church as the vital principle of human society, making this idea the foundation of his social thought. A fierce enemy of the capitalist economy, he was, together with his contemporary Carlo Marx, one of the most notable critics of the capitalist system. As an opponent of State absolutism and bureaucratic centralism, he advocated a society harmoniously divided into classes. Through his speeches and writings, V. Christian social doctrine, and his influence on Catholic social movements in Central and Eastern Europe was considerable. One year after his death, the encyclical Rerum novum appeared, whose teachings largely agreed with V.’s demands. He never set out his social program in a systematic work, but developed it in the daily press, following the course of events.