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William Graham Sumner (1840–1910)

Sumner was the most prominent American exponent of what Hofstadter later called “Social Darwinism” — the application of evolutionary language to social and economic inequality. His central claim: social inequality reflects natural differences in ability, and government intervention to redistribute wealth or protect the weak impedes the natural sorting of the capable from the incapable. “The drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things.” The position drew explicitly on Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy and cast the competitive market as a natural-selection mechanism operating on individuals and institutions. Sumner was also a serious sociologist — his later work, particularly Folkways (1906), developed a theory of social norms and customs that has proved more durable than his political economy. The two sides of his career illustrate a pattern: the political advocacy has shaped his historical reputation, while the sociological work has influenced subsequent scholarship.

Life

Born 30 October 1840 in Paterson, New Jersey. His father was an English immigrant mechanic. Educated at Yale (BA, 1863), then studied theology at Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford. Ordained as an Episcopal minister (1869). Appointed professor of political and social science at Yale (1872), where he spent the rest of his career — forty years in a single department. The shift from ministry to social science was influenced by Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1873), which Sumner adopted as a textbook and which reshaped his intellectual commitments.

Sumner was a popular and influential teacher — his lectures on political economy attracted hundreds of students. He was also a public controversialist: his essays on economics, tariffs, and social policy were widely read, and his defence of laissez-faire brought him into conflict with advocates of progressive reform. Yale’s administration attempted to censor his use of Spencer in the classroom; Sumner resisted and won, establishing academic freedom as a principle (a fight that ironically benefited the very reformers he opposed).

Died 12 April 1910 in Englewood, New Jersey.

The laissez-faire argument

What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) is Sumner’s most concentrated political statement. The argument: the “Forgotten Man” — the industrious, self-reliant middle-class citizen — is burdened by schemes to help the poor, which are paid for by his taxes and reduce his ability to provide for his own family. Government redistribution transfers resources from the competent to the incompetent, slowing the natural process by which society improves through the differential success of the capable.

The evolutionary framing is explicit. Sumner drew on Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” and presented economic competition as a natural-selection mechanism: firms that serve consumers well survive; firms that do not fail. Individuals who work hard and save prosper; those who do not fall behind. Interference with this process — through tariffs, subsidies, welfare, or regulation — protects the unfit at the expense of the fit and weakens the social organism.

The position was common in Gilded Age America but Sumner stated it more systematically than most. His influence on public discourse was substantial; the extent to which he influenced actual policy is debated. Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) placed Sumner at the centre of the Social Darwinist tradition; subsequent historians (particularly Robert Bannister) have argued that Hofstadter’s framing overstates the coherence of “Social Darwinism” as a movement and oversimplifies Sumner’s own views.

Folkways

Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906) is Sumner’s major sociological work and has had a longer scholarly afterlife than his political economy. The argument: social behaviour is governed not by rational calculation or moral principle but by folkways — habits, customs, and conventions that arise spontaneously, are transmitted through imitation and socialisation, and acquire the force of moral obligation (“mores”) through long practice.

Folkways are not chosen; they evolve. They arise from the need to satisfy basic interests (hunger, sex, vanity, fear), and they persist because they work — or because they have acquired institutional backing that protects them from challenge. Sumner distinguished folkways (customary practices) from mores (practices invested with moral authority) and argued that the mores of a society are not derivable from universal moral principles but are products of the society’s particular history.

The concept of ethnocentrism — the tendency of every group to regard its own customs as natural and superior — is Sumner’s coinage, introduced in Folkways. The term has become standard in sociology and anthropology, independent of its original theoretical context.

Where Sumner stops

The laissez-faire argument rests on an analogy between economic competition and natural selection that does not hold under examination. Natural selection operates on heritable variation — traits that are transmitted genetically from parent to offspring. Economic success is not heritable in the same sense: it depends on inherited wealth, social connections, education, and institutional context as much as on individual ability. Sumner’s framework conflates the heritability of traits (biological) with the heritability of social position (institutional), and the conflation undermines the evolutionary argument. The critique was made at the time by Lester Ward and others, and it remains the standard objection.

Sumner’s Folkways sits in tension with his political economy. The folkways argument implies that social norms are products of historical contingency, not of natural law — that what a society regards as “natural” is in fact conventional. But the laissez-faire argument depends on treating economic competition as natural rather than conventional. If folkways shape economic behaviour (and Sumner’s own sociology implies they do), then the “natural” market is itself a set of folkways, and the claim that government intervention is “unnatural” loses its force. Whether Sumner recognised this tension is unclear; he did not address it directly.

The historical reputation is shaped by Hofstadter’s framing, which placed Sumner as the paradigmatic American Social Darwinist. Bannister argued that the label is partly retrospective — that Sumner’s own intellectual commitments were more nuanced than the label suggests, and that “Social Darwinism” as Hofstadter defined it was as much a creation of Hofstadter’s mid-century liberalism as a description of Gilded Age thought. Whether Sumner is best understood as a Social Darwinist (Hofstadter’s reading), as a Spencerian (closer to Sumner’s own self-description), or as a sociologist whose political economy and sociology pull in different directions, is debated.

Key works

See also: Spencer · Hofstadter · Galton · Darwinism