William Graham Sumner | Biography

Best known for his encyclopedic book Folkways (1906), William Graham Sumner was a founding father of American sociology. He explored the foundations of social history and laws of social change from the perspectives of social Darwinism, classical economics, and scientific positivism. Trained for the ministry at Yale, Sumner gravitated to economics and social science through graduate study in Germany and England. As a sociologist, his teaching and writing pushed American social science to abandon philosophical pursuits and embrace investigation of empirical facts. According to his contemporary, Robert E. Park, "the effect of his researches was to lay a foundation for more realistic, more objective, and more systemic studies in the field of human nature and society than had existed up until that time."

William's parents emphasized the value of sobriety, self-reliance, and personal responsibility. This childhood emphasis later led him to embrace classical economic doctrine, including laissez-fare policies of market regulation. Sumner's education trained him in inductive empiricism. This approach involves generalizing concepts based on the observation of particulars. That, along with his exposure to German historicism, led Sumner to spend his professional career seeking laws of history through observation of societal indicators. For Sumner, the key to ensuring social progress involved developing a critical understanding of the laws that direct it.

Following formal study, Sumner spent two years tutoring at Yale and four years as a clergyman in the Episcopal Church. He returned to Yale in 1872 to occupy a chair in Social Science where he remained until his death in 1910. While he was one of the institution's most popular teachers, he was also the most controversial. Sumner insisted on avoiding philosophical speculation where the studies of scientific fact were possible. This insistence put him at odds with an academic culture that was strongly committed to metaphysical inquiry. The issue came to a head when Yale's president, Noah Porter, demanded that Sumner refrain from using Herbert Spencer's controversial textbooks. Though Sumner agreed to use other texts, he publicly criticized Porter's logic as antagonistic to progressive thinking. For Sumner, societies progress and regress according to scientific laws and principles. Accordingly only those disciplines that use the scientific method could hope to seek truth.

Sumner's general philosophy was anchored in evolutionary theory. He believed that all social behavior conforms to natural law. Building on the thought of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, he suggested that a man to land ratio is at the heart of societal evolution. Like Herbert Spencer, he argued that human beings struggle against one another and nature to secure scarce resources. As population density increases the availability of those resources decreases, which forces adaptation. Those with superior intelligence, virtue, and efficiency will adapt and reap the rewards of nature. But those with weaker constitutions will be forced to relocate if they are to survive. At the time Sumner wrote, thousands of poverty stricken immigrants were entering the United States from southern and eastern Europe providing evidence for his assertions.

Evolutionary theory informed Sumner's public writing and lectures between 1875 and 1890. He believed that trade unions, charity, and other forms of social welfare prevent nature from bearing its course and ultimately lead to societal regression. Sumner's fears were anchored in his understanding of human free will. Human beings, he reasoned, have full license to ignore natural law despite their best interests. After nearly twenty years of intense writing, teaching, and lecturing about the impending dangers, Sumner experienced a nervous breakdown. He took a brief sabbatical and shifted his focus from the future to the past. The product of this research was his monumental book Folkways.

In the work, Sumner argued that human groups develop constellations of habits and norms that coincide with their environmental realities. Folkways are designated as those informal group habits that emerge through trial and error. In contrast, mores are institutionalized norms that nearly all members of the group abide. Sumner maintained his pessimism about society's future. His research suggested that inherited folkways tend to suspend the potential for progress. Yet, he held hope that this fate could be avoided through the scientific study of social laws. With such knowledge, lawmakers and administrators could shape the mores to ensure a progressive future.

Sumner spent the final years of his life helping to build the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association). He was the body's first Vice President and later became President in the final year of his life. He died in 1910, just four years after the publication of Folkways. His main influence on the field of sociology was to anchor it as a scientific discipline.