William Graham Sumner – Social Darwinist

William Graham Sumner – Social Darwinist

Sumner was the follower of Darwin’s ideas and Herbert Spencer’s, Social Darwinism. He is considered to be vigorous and influential social Darwinist in America. He was a professor at Yale College. He developed the concepts of Folkways, diffusion, and ethnocentrism. He is not as big as Spencer but his ideas were bold enough to be recognized. He played three important roles in the development of American thought, he was a great Puritan preacher, an exponent of the Classical pessimism of Ricardo and Malthus, and an assimilator and popularizer of evolution. He was able to build a bridge between the economic ethic set in motion by the Reformation and the thought of the nineteenth century.

William Graham Sumner came from a hard working family. He grew up in the environment where he was taught to respect Protestant economic virtues. Hard work and efficiently utilizing money leads to the result in success. After reading, Illustration of Political Economy written by Harriet Marti he became aware of the wage fund doctrine, and other theories associated with that. His understanding of capital, labor, money and trade were based upon the book, Illustration of Political Economy. He published books like Earth hunger, The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over, The Forgotten Man, Folkways and others. His intellectual ideas were passed through the columns of popular journals and from the lecture platform, he waged a holy war against reformism, protectionism, socialism, and government interventionism.

Sumner was very influenced with the Spencer’s ideas. He was unclear about the Spencer’s ideas about creating a systematic science of society after his graduation. However, Spencer’s proposals aided Sumner’s ini...

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...roblems and issues, which a middle class man has to go through in such a system. He attacked democracy and but he had no sympathy for plutocracy. He was about to resign from the Yale because of the fight with the President Porter about the over use of the book The Study of Sociology as a textbook. He never become fainter although of many critics. The Republican Press and Republican alumni Yale were fighting for his dismissal from the Yale. Folkways was one of his best work, but the ideas presented in folkways were never reconciled with rest of his thought. Folkways was considered to be the products of natural forces as evolutionary growths.

Works Cited:

Porter, Duncan M. and Graham, Peter W. The Portable Darwin. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. London: University of California Press, 1989.