Sumner, William Graham (1840–1910)

William Graham Sumner, professor of economics and sociology at Yale University, was a leading advocate of free-market capitalism, minimal government, and individualism. In the 1890s, he opposed American imperialism. His Folkways (1907) was one of the most important works in early American sociology.

Born in Patterson, New Jersey, Sumner was the son of recent British immigrants. From his artisan father, he inherited a distrust of social reform and an admiration for the hard-working, tax-paying citizen whom he called the “forgotten man.” After attending Yale on a scholarship, Sumner traveled to Europe and studied languages and theology in Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford. From 1868 to 1872, he was an Episcopalian minister, finally as rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Morristown, New Jersey.

Sumner returned to Yale as professor of political economy in the fall of 1872, and he remained there until his death. In a dozen books and more than a hundred articles, he defended free trade, sound currency, and private enterprise. Although he denounced labor unions as unjustified monopolies, he conceded that strikes tested the market. In What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), he attacked all “schemes of philanthropy,” especially those imposed by government. “The greatest folly of which a man can be capable,” he wrote a decade later, is “to sit down with a slate and pencil to plan out a new social world” (Bannister 1992: 261).

Sumner insisted that liberty does not derive from abstract rights but is only “the chance to fight the struggle for existence [against nature] for one's self.” Civil liberty requires responsibility, which “can be established and upheld only by law” (Bannister 1992: 240). These references to the “struggle for existence” later earned Sumner a reputation as a ruthless “social Darwinist.” Some scholars, however, argue that his primary inspiration came from Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) and other British economists, not from Charles Darwin (1809–1882) or the evolutionist philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and that the label misrepresents his views.

In The Conquest of the United States by Spain (1899), Sumner charged that the United States was violating its principles by annexing the Philippines. In his later writings, he denounced plutocracy as a threat to American democracy. In Folkways, he defined folkways as methods developed through trial and error to satisfy human needs most expediently, material interest being the source and sanction of all social action. Mores are folkways grown moral, reflective, and coercive. They have the authority of fact: there is no appeal to right and wrong beyond them. Democracy and marriage, for example, are part of American mores, according to Sumner. Legislation by itself cannot effect change without corresponding shifts in the society's mores. Questioning the mores indicates that the underlying folkways are weakening.