Sumner, William Graham

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) is credited with teaching the first sociology course in the United States. He [Page 815]was one of the founders of the American Sociological Society movement and its second president. Sumner was greatly influenced by Herbert Spencer and became an American proponent of social Darwinism and laissez-faire.

Sumner was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and spent his childhood in Hartford, Connecticut. His parents had emigrated from England and raised William in a strict religious environment. After spending four years at Yale (1859–1863), Sumner attended the Universities of Geneva, Goettingen, and Oxford (1863–1866) in preparation for the ministry. While in Europe he changed his religion from the Congregational to the Protestant Episcopal faith, becoming ordained a deacon in 1867. Sumner began doubting mystical theory and shifted his focus to the concrete facts and theories of social science. In 1872, he solidified his decision by accepting a position as professor of political and social science at Yale. He taught Spencer's Study of Sociology and almost lost his position in 1881 because of it. Sumner had become a complete advocate for social evolutionism and the expansion of industrial and capitalist society in the United States.

Sumner's most significant contribution to sociological theory rests with his best-known work, Folkways (1906), a book that describes the origins of folkways found in society and their consequential influence on manners, customs, mores, and morals. Folkways are a societal force produced by frequent repetition of petty acts, often by great numbers acting collectively or, at least, when acting in the same way when faced with the same need. As Sumner explained in Folkways,

Folkways are made unconsciously, they are the product of recurrent habits, guided by recurrent needs of the individual and of the group. As Sumner had learned from Spencer, “guidance by custom” is the most common thread among diverse groups of people. Custom is the product of concurrent action, over time, by mass actions driven by mass needs and wants. Mass action is stimu-lated by the desire of people to act collectively with one another. Sumner stated that there are four great motives of human action: hunger, sex passion, vanity, and fear (of ghosts and spirits). Associated with each of these motives are interests. Human life revolves around satisfying these interests. Society dictates which courses of action (folk-ways) are proper in the attempt to satisfy basic needs and desires.

When certain folkways become associated with philosophical and ethical issues of proper behavior, they are elevated to another plane. These coercive and constraining norms are called mores. Mores come down to us from the past and take on the authority of facts. Each individual is born into them and are subjected to their “legitimacy.” Mores serve as regulators of the political, social, and religious behaviors of individuals, and they are not affected by “scientific facts.” Mores often consist of taboos, which indicate the things that must not be done. Taboos are linked to past behaviors that have been proven to cause unwelcome results and therefore contain reference to a reason as to why specific acts should not be allowed. Sumner acknowledged that folkways, mores, and taboos vary from society to society and therefore promotes the field of ethology. Ethology is the term he used for the study of manners, customs, usages, and mores, including the study of the way in which they are formed; how they grow or decay; and how they affect the interests of those who are affected by them. The sociologist in particular must pay attention to the folk-ways and mores of a society, for they have a great impact on human behavior.

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