William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) was the leading American advocate of a free-trade industrial society, which is what he believed the socialists meant by "capitalism."

He graduated from Yale University in 1863, where he had been a member of Skull & Bones. Later he became a professor of sociology at Yale. As a sociologist, his major accomplishments were developing the concepts of diffusion, folkways, and ethnocentrism. Sumner's work with folkways led him to conclude that attempts at reform were useless. He was a staunch advocate of laissez-faire economics. Sumner was a Titan in the intellectual defense of free-trade liberalism, and in his heyday and after there were Sumner Clubs here and there. He heavily criticized socialism/communism, then the up-and-coming competition. One adversary he mentioned by name was Edward Bellamy, whose national variant of socialism was set forth in Looking Backward, published in 1888, and the much more powerful sequel "Equality." The clash of their ideas was part of the backdrop to the Cleveland, McKinley and T. Roosevelt administrations.

External Links to Sumner's Works

Works by William Graham Sumner

Major Works of William Graham Sumner

Quotes

"The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man." ^*]

"There are two chief things with which government has to deal. They are the property of men and the honor of women."

"I think the hardest fact in human life is that two and two cannot make five; but in sociology while people will agree that two and two cannot make five, yet they think that it might somehow be possible by adjusting two and two to one another in some way or other to make two and two equal four and one-tenth." (Sumner Today, 1940 p. 82)

"Nature's remedies against vice are terrible. She removes the victims without pity. A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness." -- from the essay "The Forgotten Man" //www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/SumnerForgotten.htm.

"The practical thrust of Noah Porter's effort was to prevent Sumner from assigning Spencer's Principles of Sociology to his classes. In this he prevailed, Spencer was righteously suppressed. Porter's success, one imagines, proceeded less from the force of his argument against Spencer's acceptance of the Darwiniain thesis -- natural selection, survival of the fittest -- as a social and economic axiom than from the unfortunate fact that he was also the president of the university." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, Annals of an Abiding Liberal, 130

American sociologists | 1840 births | 1910 deaths

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