The American social philosopher, economist, and cultural anthropologist William Graham Sumner was graduated from Yale in 1863 and continued his studies at Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford, with the aim of entering the Episcopal ministry. He did so in 1867, having returned to America the preceding year. Increasingly, however, this calling conflicted with his wider interests, and when in 1872 he was offered the chair of political and social science at Yale University, he gladly accepted it. He soon gained a considerable reputation as a teacher, publicist, and local politician, but his chief claim to renown derived from his studies in social development, culminating in his masterpiece, Folkways (1907).

Two conflicting impulses—polemical and scientific—dominated Sumner's approach to the study of society. It was undoubtedly the polemical impulse that fed the scientific. Dissatisfaction with the reformist dogmatism of his age prompted his search for a...