Although among their predecessors in the social-science movement the doctrines of Auguste Comte had by far the most potent influence, the generation of Sumner and Ward was under the spell of the work of Herbert Spencer and the social Darwinists. Not all of them accepted the main lines of Spencer's doctrine, but even those who opposed him in important respects felt the need to respond to his challenge.
Around the turn of the century the social Darwinist camp in America came to be largely divided between "conservative Darwinism," glorifying the captains of industry as the flowers of civilization and giving ideological support for an economic system of uncontrolled laissez faire, and "reform Darwinism." The latter tendency look major clues from Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin's ardent disciple, his "Bulldog" . as he was then called. In his "Evolution and Ethics" of 1893 Huxley argued that there were two distinct processes in which mankind participated, the "cosmical" and the "ethical.' Evolution and the survival of the fittest belonged to the "cosmical" part of human destiny, but humankind in evolution had created an ethical process that deviated from, and worked counter to, the "natural" course of evolution, so that ethics need not take any lesson from biology." To the reform Darwinists there was no disjunction between the findings of evolutionary theories and efforts at making the world over in the image of ethical ideas. Sumner was squarely in the first camp, while Ward, together with a number of other early sociologists, was in the second.
William Graham Sumner, 1840-1910
Sumner, the most outspoken disciple of Herbert Spencer in America, combined evolutionism, laissez‑faire, and Malthusian pessimism with the ardor of a great Puritan divine. There were few men on the American scene who applied the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest more inflexibly to the human social realm than this Episcopal rector turned sociologist. One is tempted to sum up Sumner's whole social philosophy in one of his pragmatic sentences: "Society needs first of all to be free from meddlers--that is, to be let alone."" It is doubtful whether Sumner in his youth ever believed in the invisible hand of God as deeply as he later believed in the invisible hand of Adam Smith.
Sumner's father was a frugal, hardworking Lancashire immigrant mechanic, a devout Protestant who, if one is to believe Sumner's own portrayal, had a deep and passionate relation to but one social cause--that of abstinence. In his later life Sumner abandoned most of his father's religious beliefs but never the underlying "Protestant" attitude. Thrift, hard work, prudence, and abstinence remained his central virtues and values. His father would have approved most heartily when the son wrote, "Let us not imagine that . . . any race of men on this earth can ever be emancipated from the necessity of industry, prudence, continence and temperance if they are to pass their lives prosperously."
When only thirteen or fourteen years old, Sumner, already an avid reader, came across Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy at the library of the Young Men's Institute at Hartford, Connecticut. From this collection of didactic stories popularizing Ricardo and Malthus he imbibed free‑trade principles, and learned "natural truths" such as "Restriction on the liberty of exchange‑is a sin in government." Sumner said later on that "my main conceptions of capital, labor, money and trade were all formed by those books which 1 read in my boyhood."" When, after a brief career as an Episcopalian rector Sumner lost his religious faith under the impact of Spencer and Darwin and accepted a teaching position at Yale College, he kept his faith in free enterprise.
As generations of Yale College graduates consistently exposed to "Sumnerology" assumed their place in the banking and commercial world, as his class talks were reported fully in New York dailies and letter columns began to be filled with Sumnerian polemics, it became apparent that Sumner was by no means a dispassionate recorder and observer of the laws of evolution and competition. Fighting against protectionism and for free trade, attacking the imperialist tendencies behind the Spanish‑American War, Sumner was suspect to a major part of the community of wealth and to the high and mighty. The Republican press and Republican alumni repeatedly tried to have him dismissed from Yale." But Sumner was not to be dismayed. To him, the advocates of protectionism were not only in error, they' were in sin, and he was convinced that "socialism was profoundly immoral." Even though he had been converted to evolutionism, the Christian moralism of his background informed much of his later writing.
Sumner saw himself as a sort of apostle to the gentile--an old testament prophet who sorrowfully and wrathfully castigated his people for the errors of their ways. In an age of "foxes" Sumner was a "lion," passionately defending free individual enterprise at just the moment when it was rapidly displaced by huge trusts and corporate giants. He fought his losing battle with all the feeling of moral righteousness that underlay the reformist ardor of his colleagues on the left of center.
To Sumner, "the law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest. The history of humankind, Sumner taught, can be viewed as a perpetual struggle between individuals, classes and groups. In fact, Sumner's doctrine involved a kind of economic determinism considerably more dogmatic and unbending than that of Karl Marx. "The thing which makes and breaks institutions," he wrote, "is economic force, acting on the interest of man, and, through him, on human nature."" In his opinion, the "views of rights are thus afloat on a tide of interests."
Sumner was impatient with those reformers who wished to correct the balance of natural forces as they worked themselves out in the harsh struggle for survival. "They do not perceive," he wrote, "that . . . 'the strong' and the 'weak' are terms which admit of no definition unless they are made equivalent to the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant. They do not perceive, furthermore, that if we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest."
Had Sumner only produced secular sermons, impassioned pamphlets in favor of evolutionism, crusading philippics against moral crusaders, he would probably only be remembered as a not very original social Darwinist, a Spencer in American dress. In fact, fairly late in his life (1906) he published the one work, Folkways," that left an enduring mark on the subsequent history of American sociology. In this work, his moralism is largely replaced by a pervasive moral relativism, yet his underlying laissez-faire stance remained virtually unchanged.
The subtitle of this work, "A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals," describes its content. Supporting his thesis with a vast array of ethnographic and historical materials culled from a variety of cultural contexts, Sumner attempted to develop a comprehensive theory of human evolution while also giving an account of the persistence of basic human traits.
Guided by instincts that humankind had acquired from its animal ancestors, Sumner argued, and by the tendency to avoid pain and maximize pleasure, the human race had gradually, through trial and error developed types of group conduct, habitual ways of doing things, adaptation to the human environment and a successful struggle for existence. These types of group conduct and below the level of conscious deliberation.
When these habitual ways of doing things, which Sumner calls "folkways," are regarded as assuring the continued welfare of the group, they become transformed into "mores." "The mores are the folkways, including the philosophical and ethical generalizations as to societal welfare which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as they grow. They are the ways of doing things which are current in a society to satisfy human needs and desires, together with the faiths, notions, codes, and standards of well living which inhere in those ways . .. ." The mores can make anything right. "What they do is that they cover usage in dress, language, behavior, manners etc., with the mandate of current custom, and give it regulation and limits within which it becomes unquestionable." They are coercive and constraining. They dominate all members of society or groups, and they are enforced by sharp negative sanctions in case of infringement. Whereas sanctions against deviance from folkways may only be relatively mild-like gossip, for example-the sanctions upon infringing mores are severe precisely because they are thought to guarantee the welfare of the group.
Sumner's third key concept is "institutions." "An institution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine, interest) and a structure .... The structure holds the concept and furnishes instrumentalities for bringing it into the world of fact."" Most institutions of the past have been "crescive"; that is, they have slowly grown out of folkways and mores. "Enacted" institutions, in contrast, belong to the modern world as products of rational invention and intention. Religion, property, and marriage are primarily crescive institutions, whereas modern banks and the electoral college are enacted institutions. But acts of legislation can succeed only to the extent that they have their roots in the mores. "Legislation has to seek standing ground on existing mores . . . to be strong it must be consistent with the mores." Folkways, mores, and crescive institutions are based on sentiment and faith. Laws and enacted institutions, on the other hand, are conspicuously brought into being and embody positive prescriptions or proscriptions of "a rational and practical character."" But, and this is of the utmost importance to Sumner, laws "are produced out of the mores" which they codify. Hence any attempt to legislate against the mores is bound to fail. Stateways can never contradict folkways.
It should be apparent by now that although in Folkways Sumner subscribed to a consistent moral relativism, he still maintained his prepotent belief in laissez-faire. Any attempt to legislate against the mores, he argues, is bound to fail. The mores do change, but they change slowly, in tune with changing "life conditions," with changing adjustments of mankind to its surrounding environment, and mainly through trial and error. They roll along like a muddy river, and any attempt to influence them purposefully is bound to upset the cosmic applecart. Sumner must have chuckled beatifically in his heavenly abode when he learned of the attempts to legislate prohibition in America and their disastrous failure in the face of American drinking mores.
And yet, it would seem apparent that his conservative bias made him overlook the fact that while homogeneous societies may indeed be strongly resistant to attempts at deliberate change, this is by no means the case in societies that are heterogeneous, where the mores of groups or strata are in conflict and tension. In such societies, deliberate efforts can indeed subvert previous mores held on to by vested interests. Enacted legislation is vastly more powerful in such societies than Sumner was willing to concede. When news about the success of civil-rights legislation reached Sumner in heaven, his beatific smile must soon have been replaced by an expression of disbelief and pain.
Sumner's argument, when shorn of its all-embracing pretensions, may still be of considerable usefulness when one attempts to account for large areas of persistence even in a world subject to rapid waves of change. However, in addition to the general message of Folkways, this work also contains a number of other observations that have had an enduring influence on subsequent theorizing. Only a few can be mentioned here. Though he stressed that, impelled by the major human motives‑hunger, love, vanity, and fear men and women were most of the time engaged in conflict, he also highlighted what he termed "antagonistic cooperation." This term refers to "the combination of two persons or groups to satisfy a great common interest while minor antagonisms of interest which exist between them are suppressed."" That is, Sumner highlighted the important fact that conflict and cooperation are not diametrically opposed notions but are intertwined in a variety of concrete ways that can only be separated analytically.
Two related notions developed by Sumner are perhaps of even greater interest. Both of them have entered the common language. Sumner distinguishes between the "in-group" and the "out-group" and posits a dialectical relation between them. "A group of groups may have some relation to each other (kin, neighborhood, alliance, connubium, and commercial) which draws them together and differentiates them from others. Thus a differentiation arises between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others--groups, out-groups. The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of hostility and war towards other-groups are correlative to each other. The exigencies of war with outsiders are what makes peace inside.." In a related train of thought Summer points to the tendency of a group to view itself as "the center of everything, and all others as scaled and rated with reference to it."" This tendency lie termed "ethnocentrism." Both of these notions have led to an impressive amount of research since Sumner's days and have proved exceedingly fruitful guides."
Even though Sumner's ingrained conservative stance has surely alienated many contemporary sociologists and has led them to neglect him, there is no doubt that he will continue to occupy an honored niche among the founders of our discipline. The crisp and pithy prose of the old curmudgeon from Yale can still be read with considerable profit, especially by those who persist in believing that if there were only a law most human problems could be legislated out of existence
Lester F. Ward: 1841-1913
When discussing Ward's contribution to sociology, we enter a universe of discourses very much different from that of his contemporary, Sumner.
Like so many American reformers in the Progressive age, Ward was a son of the Middle Border. Born in Illinois in 1841 into the family of an itinerant mechanic and tinkerer, Ward passed his youth in dire poverty. Whenever some time was left over from his many jobs in mills and factories, he taught himself various languages, as well as biology and physiology, and finally succeeded in becoming a secondary-school teacher. After two years of soldiering in the Civil War, Ward moved to Washington and entered the civil service as a clerk in the Department of the Treasury. Continuing his struggle for learning, he went to evening‑session colleges and managed within five years to take several diplomas in the arts, medicine, and the law. Still later, Ward continued his studies in the natural sciences and came to specialize in paleontology and botany. In 1883 he was made chief paleontologist in the United States Geological Survey. Only in 1906, near the end of his career, was he finally called to teach in the groves of academe-he accepted a chair in sociology at Brown University. He died in 1913."
Though he wrote the first major treatise in sociology in America, Dynamic Sociology, Ward never had any formal instruction in the social sciences and was largely self‑tutored. His ponderous manner of writing reflects his struggle to acquire his considerable learning in sociology. It is probably largely due to his lack of expository skills that Ward is hardly read today, while Sumner, a masterful stylist, still commands a considerable audience, And yet it would seem that in some ways Ward is a considerably more "modern" author than Sumner. While the latter hankered after a free‑enterprise economy that was already largely disappearing during his lifetime, the former laid the foundations for what later generations called a welfare state.
Ward shared with Sumner an intense admiration for Darwin 'and for evolutionary science. One might even call him a social Darwinist, but only if it is understood that his allegiance to that doctrine was of the reform variety. Though detailed treatment of his work would probably focus on several other of his contributions to the emergent discipline of sociology, I shall limit myself here to only two of them: his evocation of the need for social planning and the emergence of a "sociocratic" society, and his break with the biologistic analogies of social Darwinism and of Spencer's doctrine..
Spencer and his cothinkers had argued for a monistic explanation of all human and natural phenomena. They believed that such concepts as natural selection, the survival of the fittest, or differentiation applied to the human and nonhuman field alike, that they were the master keys that would allow access to all the riddles of the universe. Their defense of laissez‑faire economics followed logically, or so they thought, from the universal natural laws that they believed to be firmly established by evolutionary science. It is this major premise that Ward wished to refute. Since he was wedded by background and general orientation to a meliorist and reformist stance, he considered it of the utmost importance to be able to show that the laws of natural evolution did not apply to human development, there being "no necessary harmony between natural law and human advantage."
Ward laid the foundation for a dualistic interpretation according to which natural evolution proceeded in a purposeless manner, while human evolution was informed by purposeful action. Nature proceeded according to the laws of "genesis," human evolution was guided by "telesis." By introducing this bifurcation, Ward undermined the Spencerian system which rested largely on biological analogies. He thus helped to emancipate the emergent social sciences from dependence both on biological processes and on laissez‑faire principles. To Ward, nature's way was not the human way. As Hofstader puts it, "Animal economics, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, results from the multiplication of organisms beyond the means of subsistence. Nature produces organisms in superabundance and relies upon the wind, water, birds, and animals to sow her seed. A rational being, on the other hand, prepares the ground, eliminates weeds, drills holes, and plants at proper intervals; this is the way of human economics. While environment transforms the animal, man transforms the environment."
Given this basic bifurcation between human and nonhuman processes, Ward argued, Malthus's theory of population, which had been so instrumental in forming both Spencer's and Darwin's views, does not apply to the human race. "The fact is," he wrote, "that men and society are not, except in a very limited sense, under the influence of the great dynamic laws that control the rest of the animal world .... If we call biological processes natural, we must call social processes artificial. The fundamental principle of biology is natural selection, that of sociology is artificial selection .... If nature progresses through the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the weak."
Having demolished, at least to his satisfaction, the case for "natural" laissez-faire, Ward then proceeded to argue for a sociology based on the analysis of changing human institutions in terms of theological progress. He conceded to the orthodox social Darwinists, and to the Austrian "conflict theorists" Gumplowicz and Ralzenhofer in particular, that in the past the struggle between races and classes had indeed marked the course of human history. He went even so far as to assert that, "When races stop struggling progress ceases." Yet he was also at pains to point out the wastefulness of such struggles, and he expressed the hope, indeed the certainty, that in the future they would be eliminated through planned and purposeful action led by an enlightened government, a "sociocracy."
Welcoming all popular movements which in his day worked for reform, he saw in these movements the seeds of an emergent "people's government" that would set its course on a deliberate recasting of the social order. There are, to be sure, certain passages in Ward that remind one of Comtean delusionsabout the ability of scientist-kings to guide humanity into a socially engineered and managed paradise. But his propensities in this direction were held in check most of the time by his prepotent belief in education as the rational means of developing the intellect of even the humblest men and women. Education, would enable them to participate consciously in the self-government of democratic citizens. He was convinced that " . . . the bottom layer of society, the proletariat, the working class . . . nay, even the denizens of the slums . . . are by nature the peers of the boasted 'aristocracy of brains, if only they would receive proper instruction." The man who had sacrificed so much in order to acquire an education put an almost unlimited faith in the conscious enlargement of the mind of every man and woman. One may judge this overriding faith to have been somewhat naive, but one can hardly deny a the nobility of this vision.
Ward was by no means always consistent. In particular, despite his stress on telic processes and the unique and artificial character of social organization, he repeatedly relapsed into Darwinistic language and cosmological speculations of an evolutionary nature. But it remains his great historical merit to have made the first major attempt in America to free sociological inquiry from its biological fetters and to have stressed that collective human purposes, informed by an applied sociology of social reform, might inaugurate a major new step in the direction of what at a later date Amitai Etzioni called "the active society.
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